Interview with Janice East Moorehead Grant

Harford Living Treasure Series
An Oral History by
JANICE E. M. GRANT
26 April 2016
Harford Living Treasure Janice East Moorehead Grant
Interviewer: Doug Washburn = DW
Interviewee: Janice East Moorehead Grant = JG
Hello, this is Doug Washburn for the Harford County Public Library. Today is 26 April 2016, and I'm with Harford Living Treasure Janice Moorehead Grant of Aberdeen.
DW How are you, ma'am?
JG I'm blessed. I like to say Janice East Moorehead Grant.
DW Oh! OK.
JG East is my mother's maiden name. She put that in there. I use it.
DW (Chuckles) So, you were born in Aberdeen?
JG Born in Aberdeen on this very property on Edmund Street and I guess Edmund Street - well, you just walk straight from [Law St] on up to the other end. As I said earlier, this property was purchased by my great-grandmother, Mary Cook now - Mary Banks Cook, and also her two daughters. One daughter was my grandmother and that's Mary East Lawson and then the other was her sister, Georgiana Virginia Turner. They were all born in Aberdeen in what they call Mount Calvary but one, Georgiana, was born in Paradise. Paradise Road runs through that area but it no longer exists as Paradise. It's part of Aberdeen now. And she was the one that Jim became interested in because she had worked for the Roosevelts. In '29 she went there, answered an ad and went to work for him when he was governor at Hyde Park. Then after he became President- you know he served four terms or started the fourth. And during the war, Aunt Jo - as we called her, the family - Aunt Jo asked for a leave and became a nurse and helped with the war efforts of World War II. Then she worked at several hospitals in New York. Then when Mrs. Roosevelt became ill and she knew that they couldn't cure her, she called her back to be with her as a private nurse. She was there when Mrs. Roosevelt passed away and she was in her will. We have a copy of that will. Of course, there were a lot of people that she left something to. But Aberdeen did recognize it and put in the papers there in the Aberdeen Room Museum and also the JET Magazine. Jim became interested and he found out so much history that we didn't even know existed.
DW Hmm.
JO I think he found a five page history about our [Aunt] Jo, where she had talked about her time with the Roosevelts. She never boasted, never said anything, she was just Aunt J0 to us. Just a regular - and Ernestine knew her as well. She lived in a house that's up on the other end of this property - Edmund Street. I don't know if you heard about it but Aberdeen tried to demolish it and Jim was instrumental in helping us to save that house. He - it's just a miracle of God - he walked in the Historical Society, well, he visits there often as you probably know. He's quite an historian. He's a retired Social Studies teacher just like I am. But he said he was there on a Saturday. Now Aberdeen was going to demolish the house on Monday at 8 a.m. and the offices don't open until 8:30. So Judge Carr, William O. Carr, walks in and says "Jim, what's up?" and he told him all about the house - 411 Edmund Street, the history of Aunt Georgianna and then the other things, the Freedom Riders and all that. And the NAACP used to meet there because my cousin, Walter Banks, had been president of the NAACP for more than 30 years and my mother worked with him. There were other things we did in that house but Mrs. Roosevelt visited the house. That helps make it historical. She visited the Aberdeen Proving Ground to visit the troops. She was a very, very active First Lady. She knew the family because we had been to Hyde Park and we were all at the Inauguration. We got invitations from the President because our family believed it was important for you to know that. We'd bundle up all warm and go there and sit. So she knew that Aunt Jo lived at that house; she had come to visit. When she retired she lived there as well. So that was part of the history he told Judge Carr. Judge Carr said to Jim - and he can verify it - "You tell them my office will be open for them at 7 o'clock." So a wonderful lady who ran for Attorney General, Aisha Braveboy, volunteered to be our attorney pro bono and she did and she's excellent. She's in the Maryland Legislature and has been for some time. Excellent attorney. So she and I were up all night making the affidavits and all the - well, she knew what to do, I didn't as far writing one. I went and asked for an injunction, and they didn't give it to me. They were biding their time. So she had one hour of sleep and she came down [from Prince Georges County] and my husband went with her and they met at Judge Carr's office and -- 8 o'clock, the bulldozer was right there at the roof of the house and I had two friends from Baltimore who were both ministers -- C. D. Witherspoon and Sherrell Witherspoon -- Courtney Witherspoon. And they stood in front of the bulldozer. There's a picture of that in the paper. Eight o' one, Judge Carr called. I don't know if he called the Chief of Police or the Mayor, but he called. They were all gathered around waiting to see this demolition. They really had no authority to do it but he picked up the phone and called and said, "Cease, desist and get off the property." So the Chief of Police called me, "Ms. Grant, Ms. Grant! Did Judge Carr give you an injunction?" I said, "Yes, he did." So the injunction, of course, stands, but now that it's been made an historical house [in Harford County], it's there. In the meantime, we were struck by "Sandy" back in 2012 and we were in that hotel - the Marriott - for 14 months, that's a long time but it was nice. Someone came in in the middle of the night. And of course, you know Aberdeen has all these machines and whatever is needed for demolition and of course, they were using them to tear down homes. Someone came in in the middle of the night and totally gutted that house inside. Now it had been the house had been totally renovated by Quakers. They did that for free and the Mayor's wife, the Mayor at that time, his - I'm sorry - his mother - called me and said, "Janice, may I see your house?" And I said, "Certainly." She had something to do with the beautification of Aberdeen. So she came in and jumped up and down on the floors; she went upstairs; she went into all of the rooms. I think they had three bedrooms upstairs and a full bath. It had three
showers, a small bath downstairs, a full kitchen, full dining room, a living room and another bedroom [and an attic]. And she said there's nothing wrong with this house. So when Woody and I went to Ghana on a Missions trip we had it covered with siding and it looked really nice. But they had taken all the siding off except for the very top. I guess they couldn't reach that. John Langston was the one who began - we had hired him to renovate and give us a new porch. Well, he destroyed the porch and when I looked and saw what he had done - he stole a lot of stuff as well - we just fired him. But what had happened in the meantime, he had been working with the then Public Works director in Aberdeen. They had directed this and we were not aware that this was going on but I have two friends who are witnesses to what the house did look like because they had done work for us. They had gotten an architect to say that the house was stable and could be renovated. The house was built in 1931 which is not really that 'old, old', a little before I was born. I thank God for Jim [Chrismer] and I thank God for Judge Carr and of course, Braveboy. I called her Braveboy, Aisha Braveboy. Sounds like a Native American name, doesn't it? And we went to the office in Aberdeen [to meet with the town director and the town attorney, four of us]. This is very interesting because in the paper the town director said it's just a shell and it will collapse. So he said, [I asked,] "How do you know it's a shell and we don't?" So in our eyes, he gave something away. Later, let's see Braveboy had done the work she did, and she came from -- twice we met. I believe it was twice. Yes. Woody and my two friends, we had talked to the town director and we also talked to -- can't think of his name right now -- I'll think of it later. [Matthew Lapinsky] He gave us a certain amount of time to do this and do that. Knowing all the time what they were going to do and not giving us enough time to get it -- "Well, you didn't get it done; you have 5 days" and that kind of thing which was ridiculous. I mean who builds a house in 5 days? But nevertheless, Braveboy, the second time when we were with the town director and town attorney, they threw some pictures out at us and they showed chaos inside the house where it had been dismantled, some of it. And there were boards and things just lying all around. And lesha Braveboy said, "Where did you get those pictures?" No one answered, neither the attorney nor the town director. But I had already seen them in the attorney's office in Bel Air. And I asked him. I said, "Where did you get those pictures?" He said, "The lawyer for Aberdeen sent them to me." Well, I never indicated that I had seen them. Then on the way out Aisha, my husband, Woody; and another friend [Cornelius Scoff], the attorney asked me, the owner of the house, that they had totally dismantled and most of the inside was gutted, "Don't tell anyone you saw the pictures." Now someone has tried to destroy your house and you know it and you're not going to say anything about it? So that was that. And then of course, I think they probably -- we had a hearing. I had a friend to come with me and at the hearing, that's when they gave us a certain amount of time to do this and to do that and so forth. But I just have to say God is the one who used Judge Carr, and Jim [Chrismer]. I give him so much, so much credit. James Chrismer. I really want his name to be there at the lick. Everyone knows what he did and he really didn't know me. I was coming up the steps of the Historical Society to get some information and he said, "I know you." You ran for City Council in Aberdeen. Three times. And you also ran for Mayor. (Chuckles) I guess he, the historian, was keeping up with the news and what not, he recognized me from that. That's probably been two years or more ago since then. And he was constantly digging up information and following different guidelines and what not. He knew about my husband, Woody Grant, who was one of the Richmond Thirty-four which probably you haven't heard of. But he was a student at Virginia Union University. I didn't know him then. He and 34 others, of course, it was hundreds marched through the city of Richmond for two years. And they totally desegregated the city of Richmond -- the restaurants, department stores, everything. And they had a fifty year reunion and made a plaque with all their names and it's on the spot where a department store used to be. There's a plaque on the campus of Virginia Union with their names and there's some other store that indicates that this was where it occurred. Richmond had an entire week of celebration. And the [grand]daughter of the -- Thalhimers was the name of the department store. It took one year [two years] of marching to desegregate but they did. Now you know that was the center of the South during the Civil War, Richmond. (Chuckles) but nevertheless, he was in Army here at Aberdeen and I was teaching at Havre de Grace Consolidated which is now the Roye-Williams Elementary. I was introduced to him by a friend. There was a little place we used to go called Laico's ["social" spelled backwards] and he was there. There was really no place else for us to go. Everything was segregated in Aberdeen. Everything. Even the hospital [and the library]. There was one room in the hospital for people of color. And women who gave birth, even men were in that room on the first floor. They had "White Women" and "Colored Women" on the bathroom doors. We were, as kids, our school was right there -- the Havre de Grace Colored [High] School on Alliance and Stokes -- and my friend Vivian [Cole], my sister, Carol, and I would go over to the hospital. We didn't need to use the rest room but we would go in where it said "White Women". And the lady would say, "You're not supposed to be there. That says 'White Women', your rest room is over here" and we said, "We can't read." (Laughter) And they believed us! We were high school kids and we would just do things like that. Go in a store where you couldn't sit at the counter and order ice cream and then drop it and say, "Ooh! We dropped our ice cream." (Laughing) And go to the movie, go upstairs and sit upstairs which really was better. You could see much better. (Chuckles) Oh, just silly, silly things. Or you would have to go to the backdoor of the restaurants and get your food in a bag if you wanted it. And actually, when my brother and sister went to high school from Aberdeen -- there was no school for us in Aberdeen. There was a school called Mt. Calvary and I have a picture of that. I was there in first grade and my teacher Alma Dorsey Nelms. Excellent. She would walk -- she lived in Perryman -- and she would walk from the [Pennsylvania] train station up to Mt. Calvary, often in all types of weather. There were no substitutes, you know, things like that. Often people would give her rides but when she arrived she would have to make a fire in the pot-bellied stove and we students would go up to a stream and get the water. It's good memories, really.
DW Mmmhmm.
JG But she had one room, seventy eight students in seven grades and she taught them all. And when we left to go to [high] school we were pretty well versed. However, I say it's a joke. You had to be a moron not to learn -- to sit in a room for seven years (Chuckles) and hear the same thing over and over and over -- you had to learnt
DW Right.
JG So, later of course, I was only there one year at Mt. Calvary then D. W. Noble, who was a supervisor, came by and asked parents in Aberdeen if they would be willing to sign their children over to go to Perryman School. They needed more students. That was a big school -- two rooms! (Chuckles). So my mom signed for us to go and at first we had a bus but at times we would have to walk from Aberdeen to Perryman. Now remember there was a school right here in Aberdeen and we were not permitted to go to that school. But this is the interesting part. The first room had first, second, and third grade. The next room went from fourth to seventh grade because at that time they didn't have middle school. They called it junior high school. So in the school, Mr. Heirst, Chauncey Heirst was his name. He was a teacher and the Principal and he had the one book -- science book. We didn't have books and our parents had to buy the copy books or notebooks -- copy books that -- you may remember speckled, black and white speckled books. I do not know to this day how they managed with -- to do that for their children because things were scarce back in the '30's and '40's and what not, before the war. But the teacher would stand, Mr. Heirst would stand and read from the science book and we would write [what he read] and that would be our copy books or text books. And I had a huge knot on this [my right] finger from, you know, the writing from where the pencil, the force of the pencil, I guess. But we learned; we learned in spite of it. We did have some books. They were marked all over. Some didn't have backs on them and I guess, I don't know what their thinking could have been. I don't know. But you know what? In spite of it, we still managed. We finally -- I never got it but I went to the Havre de Grace Colored High School; graduated. It's still there. Dr. Hirsch bought it and his wife. That was my graduation school and I don't mind telling people that I graduated from Havre de Grace Colored High School. People think it was a consolidated school -- my first year teaching, I was at the Havre de Grace Consolidated School but we didn't even have a place to graduate in. We didn't even have enough rooms for school in the high school. We used the churches. St. Matthews was one and St. James, Green Street was another and when we graduated we had our baccalaureate at, I think, it was St. James, Greene Street. And we graduated from Union United Methodist Church on Old Post Road, 700 Old Post Road, which people call Swan Creek now. I had 21 people in my graduating class. There were thirteen boys and eight girls.
DW Now I've seen the programs and you actually had two graduations? There was one at the local and there was like one for the county. Is that true?
JG Yes.
DW Ok, I remember that from a gentleman named Bill Rice.
JG Yes, oh, yes.
DW That lived in the Forest Hill area -
JO Yes, I know him.
DW The Federal Hill area.
JO I didn't bring the books and I regret that I didn't. I didn't think about it. The books that are written by Patrick Spicer ...
DW Oh, yea, mmm hmm.
JO That have quite a bit of history in them.
DW Yea, he did the desegregation.
JO Yes, he did. He said he didn't even know anything about it because when he came along things were different. But after I graduated -- the interesting thing is I went to a segregated college. There weren't many. We had Morgan State; Coppin; Maryland -- we called it Princess Anne on the Eastern Shore, it's now Maryland State at Princess Anne; and Bowie. They called it Maryland State Teachers College. You could either be an elementary teacher or a junior high school teacher. Bowie, now Bowie State University. But when I graduated, it was the same thing. Our teachers worked so hard because they knew what we had to face. They were excellent, excellent.
DW So when you were actually going to school, I mean in retrospect you know that 1896 Supreme Court ruling that said "separate but equal" -- yes, they were separate but certainly not equal. In retrospect you know that but at the time you were actually going to school, did you know that your books weren't as good?
JO We knew that but there was nothing we could do about that. We knew -- well, it was obvious -- I have family in Baltimore and my mom's home was Pennsylvania -- Philly -- but she went to school. And of course, my cousins all had nice books and things like that [in Baltimore] which we didn't have so we knew the difference. There was no question about that. But there was nothing that we could basically do about it. My dad started the first garbage collection in Aberdeen. [Mr. Vandella Williams, Dr. Williams' father, also started a garbage collection business before my dad.] There wasn't one and when Aberdeen finally got theirs, they put someone over him [my dad] and let him work under them. And he couldn't take that. He left and went to New York with his family. That's his home. I believe the garbage collection was about $1.25 a month back then. Can you imagine that? (Chuckles) At college, we graduated but we still could not go to a college to get a Master's or a Doctorate in Maryland. It was not to be permitted. But Maryland would pay for us to go to any school in the United States we wanted to go to. They would pay our tuition. They would give us a stipend. And it just sounds so ridiculous to pay that but as a result we all got Master degrees, we got doctorates that the state paid for. When desegregation came they realized that the teachers [of color were far better educated] and this is in the State Department of Education, my husband went there, and he saw this report. He and George Daniel Lisby worked there and Dr. Percy Williams. It indicated that the best trained and skilled teachers were the teachers [of color] - they called us Negroes then or colored and so they stopped paying and when I knew that I couldn't go to [schools of higher education in the state of Maryland] -- I always wanted a Master's degree, always -- so I looked on the map -- worked the first summer out teaching and I looked on the map and I said, "Where can I go to school and still be in the United States and get a Master's?" And it was California! (Laughter) So I chose UCLA and that's where I got my first Master's. And then, of course, they only paid for the -- well, they were to pay but I never did get my money for that year but I borrowed money from the bank to continue to complete and then, of course, after that Mrs. Juanita Jackson Mitchell. The foremost attorney for the NAACP who herself was the first woman of color to graduate from the University of Maryland Law School, and I think she had three children at that time.
And her mother, Dr. Lilly May Carroll Jackson, there's an [elementary] school in Baltimore named for her now. Her name was Carol. She brought the NAACP to Baltimore. And then she got my cousin, Walter Banks, to [establish the NAACP in Harford County] -- they had had an NAACP here in Hat-ford County but it lapsed during the war [WWII] -- and she knew that Walter was a fighter. She knew my mother was. And so he revived the NAACP and they used to go down the roads -- dark roads! -- those were days when they lynched people. I don't know if you're aware of that but there was a lynching tree in Magnolia and there was a lynching tree in Bel Air where the mall is now. And I remember in my lifetime -- people may not admit it -- but there were five men of color who were lynched there in Magnolia because they were accused of raping a white woman. And then later she confessed [it was a lie]. And they didn't do anything to her but just ran her out of town. But they were dead. Just like the Martinsville Seven that happened. My husband remembers that in his lifetime. But we started with (chuckles) going to the restaurants we would sit in. When I became a teacher, I had two close friends both of them were in my
wedding. I wasn't married then either. Rose Weems and Sylvia Lowery. She's now Sylvia Greene. Every day after school we would leave and we would go and sit-in in some restaurant. They had been from Morgan State University. They would do sit-ins in Baltimore and I would go to Baltimore to do them also. I was arrested, I think, twice in Maryland. Once at Joppatowne [also at Gwynn Oak Park] because I actually led the civil rights movement in Harford County before I knew my husband, Naturally, you get the leader you know. [William Kunstler was our pro bono attorney]. They thought that would stop them but it didn't. The parents knew me. I grew up with them; [went to school with with them] taught some of their children and they were gracious enough to let their children march with us. [They trusted us.] We marched in Aberdeen, Havre de Grace, Joppatowne, and Edgewood. And what were we marching for? For open housing, schools, equality, for teachers of color to be hired, promoted, to be put in central office, to . . . [be treated as equals].
DW What year was that?
JG We started in 1959. In 1958, I was doing this on my own, and in 1959 [1960] Rose and Sylvia joined me because they were younger and they came later as teachers. And we continued this up until - the incident occurred and that's recorded. An African diplomat was coming to Washington, D. C, to talk to the President and on the way to Washington he stopped on Rte. 40. The place is still there. I'm trying to recall the name of it. But they refused to give him a drink of water [for his son]. And, he, you know, they had worn these -- like I wear when I minister at the jail, the little uh .... what do you call them? They hang around your neck with your picture on it and tells who you are, And it said he was an African Diplomat. [Reported in Life Magazine]
DW Okay.
JO So on the front page of Life Magazine they'd taken a picture of the lady who had refused him. And she said, "How did I know he was an African diplomat? He looked just like any ordinary nigger to me." (Laughter) So, anyway as a result of that, he went to Washington, D. C., and highly indignant. The President of the United States notified Aberdeen Proving Ground, the general who was in charge. The general who was in charge called us to a meeting. When I say "us" - teachers. I went to George Lisby who later became a member of the Board of Education. Christine Tolbert and there were a few others and I can't recall their names. So Mr. Roye, Leoni Roye, was our principal at the Consolidated School [as well as Havre de Grace Colored High School] and he couldn't figure out what was going on. Now this was the second meeting that the general had had and he talked to us about our situation and "no" we can't go to the restaurants and eat and "no" we can't live where we want to. See, teachers who came here would have a room in someone's house. Even the principal had a room in someone's house! So the general, I don't know his name, but he made Aberdeen totally off limits to all military personnel. And what did that mean? It meant the revenue, you know, the restaurants and things like that, they would lose money. And I picked up the telephone and I called, I believe, I don't remember the name of the place now, [The Red ? A gasoline station is there now] I should have thought about these things before; nevertheless, I called and pretended that I was European and I called myself having an accent. And I asked why they were treating American citizens this way. In Europe - I had been to Europe, in Europe they can go to this place, this place and this place. And he called the restauranteurs all together and they had a meeting and they decided -- well, actually the pressure of not having people -- being off limits, they were losing money. So they decided to open the restaurants and what not. Then they called me, knowing at that time I was leading the group. "Well, where are all the colored people?" I said, "Well, they just want to know they have the privilege." There was only one place at that time we could eat in and it was called the Afro Restaurant on Route 40, up above Aberdeen slightly. Then it became Afro Rooms. Mrs. Margaret Dorsey was the person who owned that and she and her sister and I think there was another lady, they owned 16 acres up there in Mount Calvary. They took in a lot of men - veterans -- from Perry Point, you know, those that didn't have families and what not. But that restaurant wasn't segregated. Anyone could eat in our restaurants, you know? We didn't segregate. But after -- some of the things were comical -- in Joppatowne [and Edgewood] we would go to the houses and say, "Do you mind having colored people living next to you." This was before "black" became popular. When we were kids, if someone called you black you were offended. (Chuckles) But the NAACP softened the blow, had a picture of a beautiful baby and under it said "Black is beautiful." And I had an aunt, my mother's sister, who was a beautiful, beautiful brown, dark skin. Oh! She was beautiful. Her name was Ethel. Aunt Ethel. And she said to me, "Jenny, I used to be ashamed of my color but when the NAACP said black is beautiful, I did this. I said, "Aunt Ethel, I always thought you were beautiful." We never thought about a color. We weren't brought up that way. I had a great grandfather who died in the same house up here [I was born in on Edmund Street]. James East was his name. People would come to the house and say to my mother, "Margaret, who's that white man in your house?" She said, "That's not a white man. That's my grandfather." And he would do this. [Place their arm next to his and say,] "Well, he's as white as I am." Well.. .(Chuckles) That's not surprising. You know, there are many at that time and many still, they called it passing? He had two daughters, well, he had more than that, but two daughters that went to New York. They could have passed for white but they didn't. Aunt Daisy and Aunt Callie. So, anyway, people would look and they would come and visit us. Aunt Daisy had red hair, kind of a beautiful red hair. Aunt Callie had what we call "coal black" hair. But (chuckles) finally, marching back and forth in Joppatowne and this place, here comes the police with a paddy wagon and they put me in the paddy wagon (chuckles). One of my friends, Walter Banks, we called him "Banky," his wife, Maudeline, she helped him. They started the first NAACP picnics in their backyard to raise funds. She said, "Janice, I saw you getting in the paddy wagon!" I was arrested but not for long.
Then I was arrested again at Gwynn Oak Park when there were lots of us who would demonstrate. But what we would do was one white person and one black person would go together because we knew we'd be arrested. And so I was arrested there in Baltimore County and not for long. I got out and we were interviewed by -- I don't even remember what stations -- I think it was Channel 2. And I really am sorry I didn't get the names of all these people because they should be remembered and they should be noted. Can you recall any of the names of the people who worked for Channel 2. He was from Mississippi and he laughed and he said, "I'm from Mississippi." And he was accustomed to that. He died of cancer but he was a great guy.
DW Hmm.
JG Probably one of the reasons I don't have all this together is because I was trying to get things together to go to a Benin City, Nigeria as well. I have a meeting up there today [New Castle, Delaware].
DW Let me back you up to your -- what's your earliest memory here in Aberdeen?
JG I remember, well, oh gosh, it goes back to a, this isn't a very good one, but my grandmother was married to a barber. His name was Joseph Lawson and he had a barber shop where men would come and they would shoot what they called craps and drink. He was a bootlegger. [Had been in prison in Virginia for murder. Once he picked Ben Ray up and threw him out of the yard. Ben Ray stopped at the gate to ask permission to enter.]
DW Mmm.
JO And a lady came -- a soldier had come and spent all of his pay gambling and she came up to the gate, called him out and she killed him. Stabbed him to death.
DW Oooh, wow!
JO And that was a horrible, horrible thing to remember. But I can recall us walking to Mount Calvary, going to the spring.
DW That was also called Bush Chapel.
JO [Correct,] Bush Chapel.
DW Yea, ok.
JO And actually it still is. I have a picture of that school.
DW I do, too. (Laughter)
JO And then I recall the bus but also, often when we would walk there would be other girls, you know, they called them white and [my] son calls them "beige." One girl said to us -- Vivian, Carol and I -- we were also friends together. Vivian Cole. They've both passed away. They're with the Lord now. One girl said to us, "I'm from the South and down there niggers get off the streets for us! They actually cross over to the other side. They don't even walk on the same street we walk on." We didn't say a word. We just kept right on walking while she was cursing us and talking about niggers here and niggers there. (Chuckling) We got across the B & O Railroad tracks and right where the traffic light is [now] for Paradise Road, there was a massive tree. And we got those girls -- it's not a pleasant thing -- but we got those girls against that tree and we (Chuckles) [beat them badly, we drew blood]. And a man came along, several men who knew who we were and they had a pickup truck. They said, "You children get in this truck, I'm taking you home," because they knew what could happen to us. But we never thought about that. There were times, as I said we would deliberately go to places and order things and just drop it and do things like that. I cannot really remember too many pleasant memories except we had this huge yard and my father -- what a personality he had -- everyone like him and he was always happy. The minute the neighborhood would get together and come to our yard, you know, after the gardens and all and they would play baseball. That was their fun recreation and the women would cook for them. And then my dad, I don't know how he learned, well, he grew up in North Carolina; well, he was there for nine years before they moved to New York. He was the one everyone would come to to slaughter pigs. And that was a big day when they slaughtered the pigs and we had to clean what they call chitterlings' the Kentucky oysters or the inside and it was terrible. You used big tubs, squeezing them and turning them out.
Then, of course, the ladies would meet. They called it Ladies Aid and they would come to different homes and have tea and cookies. They would read the Bible and pray and pray for this city, pray for this nation. And I can recall seeing the buses pass us. We would have to wait in Aberdeen then they moved us, a certain spot in Aberdeen, for the bus. Then we waited on Route 40 [to go to school in Perryman]. [While waiting for the bus] for entertainment we would name for all the cars from different states. You know Aberdeen Proving Ground was pretty big Military base. [It began in 19]17. It started the same time the land was bought. We'd see how many of us could [name] the black cars and the green cars. Things like that. Just for entertainment. I guess really there weren't that many, except family things. We'd have family gatherings. Everyone gathered in that house up there [at 411 Edmund St.] for grandmother. Family reunions we'd always have them. We still have them. We have them today, right over here on this property. We used to have three or four but now we have one once a year. There really weren't that many nice things that happened because right where my house started, if you go on Edmund Street you can still see the division. The paved road stopped -- we were the first black family -- and it stopped right where our property began. It was all dirt roads and it was a mound like a hill and they would call us the niggers on the hill. (Chuckles) And we didn't have running water. We had an outhouse. My father built that. We had a well. You know, you had the rope and you would drop it down. Then my father, he taught himself to be a carpenter and he was very much wanted. He taught himself to be a, to cook and to bake and the restaurants wanted him. He taught himself to really be a mechanic. I said if he ever had the opportunity to be educated, what he could have done. But he finally, somehow, he made one these round type -- you've seen pictures of the wells that you wind up? [To raise and lower the bucket with a rope.]
DW Oh, ok.
JO So he made one of those. In fact, I have one in my yard. (Chuckles) A wishing well. And on the roller he had the rope, of course, and then you'd roll it down and then you'd roll the water back up. It was easier. Then of course, later we got a pump. And then my grandmother, of course, she had a pump as well. And I grew up like that. It wasn't until I was in the seventh grade that we got running water, a restroom and what not in the house [built by my stepfather, Japeth Johns]. But we existed; we were happy. Well, sometimes we were hungry but not starving. My dad worked on the railroad in addition and we would walk the railroad tracks with our buckets and pick blackberries; bring them home - the ones we didn't eat on the way! (Laughter) And my mother would make blackberry dumplings and that would be our dinner. But we also didn't have money for a turkey. We had some pigs so my mom and dad roasted a pig for Christmas dinner. Christmas was his birthday. They had a little apple in the pig's mouth. We were eating high on the hog! (Laughter) We did have some good times together. [We sang Christmas Carols at Christmas on the streets and at the Havre de Grace Hospital. Mrs. Bernie Williams led our choir.] We believed in education. You know that was a must. My grandmother . . . [My mother and stepfather got their GEDs through adult education with our fine teachers at Havre de Grace Consolidated.]
DW Go ahead.
JG My grandmother and her sister, Aunt Georgianna, went to school in Chester, PA. And I believe they went to the seventh grade and I didn't know that. My grandmother was blind. She lost her sight -- they lived in Philadelphia. They had moved to [Chester then to] Philadelphia from Aberdeen and had bought this land and built the house as a summer home. They did very well. They had a restaurant on South Street. When my Grandmother Mary East lost her sight, she lost her sight by ice-skating. She fell on the ice, cut her eye, went to the hospital and they injected her with an infected needle. I don't think it was on purpose. They didn't sanitize at that time. So they closed the restaurant, sold it and moved to Aberdeen [to live at 411 Edmund St.].
The house was built in '31 as I said, but my great grandmother, I think she passed suddenly [also in 1931]. I believe she had a heart attack. So she didn't get a chance to really live in the house very long but my grandmother did. I had a cousin, Melvin Reed, who was a doctor in the Navy but at that time he was a friend of mine but really he was like a brother. My Aunt Elizabeth [East Ogburn] sent him to live with my grandmother. He was her eyes. I'd go over and help him with the dishes and what not. So, those are some pleasant memories. [I had friends the Coles, the Christys and also played with non-blacks who lived nearby.] We enjoyed each other. I had a friend, Vivian Cole Robinson. She lived down at the end of Edmund Street. Her morn, we called her Miss Lily, Miss Lily Cole. And when it would rain, there were dips in the ground and we would put on swimming suits and we'd swim on the lawn.
DW (Chuckles)
JG We would plait grass. And at that time in Aberdeen, it would flood also because history says the Chesapeake Bay, I believe it was, or the Susquehanna, would come all the way up [to Rt. 40]. And we would go out in Aberdeen and swim on Route 40! It was that much water.
Later, after high school [while I was in high school], a gentleman came named Montgomery Meigs Green. He came to the school and asked the principal if there was a girl who could come and live with him, his wife was pregnant. My principal, Mr. Roye, had mentioned my sister, Carol. My mother said no, she was too young. So I was the one who went to live with them. And it was on Sion Hill in Havre de Grace. It was mansion that was built before the United States actually became the United States because they thought Havre de Grace was going to become the Capitol, as you know. So every brick at that house and the glass [windows] came from England because there were not manufacturing places here at that time. That house, Sion Hill, went down through the family and it had 23 rooms, and of course bathrooms. I lived there for seven years. Mrs. Green, her name was Laurel Ann Watts Green from Camel, Indiana. She'd been a Gray Lady in the Navy during the war and she met Mr. Green. I think he was a - do they have lieutenants in the Navy? I can't remember. [He was from Winchester, Virginia.]
DW Mmmhmm.
JIG Even though we had lots of Navy people in our family, my brother, cousins, uncles. They treated me well. They never made any difference. Whatever they ate, I ate. And I was the cook at first and then later I helped with the children. Then when I finished college, and they helped me a lot with that. She'd been a teacher in Indiana. They called me the "governess" (laughter). And when they went on trips, I went on trips. Went to Vermont and I saw the Green Mountains and oh, they were beautiful. It looked as though every day they looked different from the sunlight on them. Burlington, Vermont, is where they had a summer home as well. So I learned to love to travel because my Aunt Jo did a lot of traveling also which is unusual back in the day for black people to do a lot of traveling but she kind of "birthed" that into me. And I got that instinct and when I met my husband in March of 1963 and we were married in June of 1963. [He was in the Army and stationed in Aberdeen.]
DW Wow! (Chuckles)
JG And we've been married for 53 years. When I said my vows I meant them.
DW (Laughter)
JG For better or worse till death d[o us part].... but he's a good husband. He's really a good man. He got out of the military. We went to Switzerland on our honeymoon. I have met Marguerite Berger who the Greens brought back with them from Switzerland as the governess. We became great friends. There was no problem with color with the Europeans. And one day Marguerite said to me, "Where do you keep it?" I said, "Keep what?" She said, "Your tail." (Laughter) I said, "I don't have a tail." She said we were told that all the people, I guess she said "negroes", had tails. I said, "No, we don't." (Laughter) And she said when we went over we stayed with her part of the time because we visited other countries, Italy and we went to Rome and what not [Holland, France and Germany]. But we went to a restaurant with her. They lived in Neuhausen. We went to a restaurant with her in Schaffhausen and some people said, "It's getting very cloudy in here." [Meaning we were dark.](Laughter) They were American. We stopped in Zurich and my husband was a very handsome young man and a couple from Chicago -- I forgot what the place is called -- but they were wealthy. And they came up and asked, "Are you Harry Belafonte?" (Laughter)
JG And we laughed! I said, "Well we all look alike but no. (Laughter) But they didn't mistake me for Lena Home. (Laughter) But I believe it was in Neuhausen Marguerite took us to the Rhine [River] Falls. That is something everyone should see. It is so beautiful. The falls, like we have Niagara, they just come down in cascades. Just one right over the other and criss cross. That is so beautiful. We didn't have a movie camera then. We'll have to go back and take it one day but that was our first trip overseas.
Later, after he was discharged we found President Kennedy's son that was born, we found out about that, who died before John John. They were talking about it and we were in London. We'd been in London for a fortnight. Then we heard about the march on Washington and we said, oh, we're going to miss that. So they told everyone to go to the embassy and sign up in Paris. So we went to the embassy and signed up as Americans. Then we decided we're going to that march. So we were able to get a flight out, you know the International Date Line, you cross one day and it's the next day. So we got back that day [the next day was the march] and my husband was still in the Army but he drove me and my twin brothers, Timothy and Thomas Morehead, to the march on Washington. That was something -- something I'll never forget. The buses, hundreds and hundreds of buses just going down Route 40, and of course, 195, it was called the Northeast, I think, Expressway. You know, later named for President Kennedy after his assassination. It was just, I just, I don't know. It was one of the most exciting things in my life. And another thing, of course, when I got saved. Born again. And the other thing was when I met Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian Emperor. That was, oh! I'll have to tell more about that because that is significant. We went to the march on Washington, we got, of course, in the crowd. I helped my brothers who were much younger than myself. We worked our way all the way up and got seats and sat there and heard the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King - I Have a Dream and Mahalia Jackson singing that song. Oh! My goodness! It was just something -- I can still see it in my mind. But you just … I can't explain it. What it was like because they had said ... you know they shut down everything. People left Washington. "Oh, those black people are going to destroy Washington" and it was very peaceful, a peaceful day. I never met a person I didn't like Will Rogers said. How can you meet someone and not like them? You don't even know them. But I also don't meet strangers. We just started conversations up and there were plenty of people that we call white that were part of that. I've never had any animosity because we weren't reared that way! Any way we spent the day there and somebody gave us a ride back on one of the buses, my two brothers and myself. I wanted to go back to Woody and I. Woody taught school in Baltimore County for two years, then he was accepted at Meharry Medical College, so we moved to Nashville. He graduated and taught there for two years in a program that the government sponsored to find ways to prevent heart attacks. In the meantime, we joined the NAACP in that branch. We were already members, life members (in Harford County]. He became the president and I became the secretary. There were no black people at the TV station up front, you know, where you could see them and they came up for licensing. So I wrote a letter, Woody signed it and then his friend, I'll think of his name because he should be recognized. [His name was Daniel Lane] Hazel Land was the field director [for the National NAACP]. It said: To the FCC - Do not give them a license to continue their TV station until they hire a person, a colored person. (I guess we still call them that.) [1968] And that person was a student at Tennessee A & I, they called it at that time. It is now Tennessee State. I believe she was reading the weather or something like that but they hired her to be up front and that was Oprah Winfrey.
DW Hmmm.
JO (Laughter) Her first job! Then of course, later she came here to Baltimore and Richard Scher and they worked together. In the meantime, we had gone to the Garbage Man's March in Memphis, and of course, the second garbage meant, you know, there was confusion there and they had to take Dr. King away. So the second march with the garbage men, "I am a Man," were the signs. We were preparing to go. We didn't have children then. Woody was at the [NAACP] office planning. We were going to have a caravan of cars to go down and join the march. I was resting in the living room and my mother-in-law called from Martinsville, Virginia. And she said, "Are you all right?" and I said, "Yea, we're fine." She said, "Well, I wondered because I know you all are always into something."
DW (Chuckles)
JO I said, "Well, how are things there?" She said, "Well, I'm calling because Dr. King got shot." I said, "No, if he'd been shot, we would know because we're getting ready to go down to the march again." I said, "Wait, let me turn the TV on." It was all over the television. Mrs. King, they had told her before she arrived that he was dead and oh! The people began. Now they knew our cars. We had a Volkswagen square back and a Karmann Ghia. They overturned cars. They didn't touch our car because they knew we were the NAACP people. NAACP. So, I got a sign and I made it say "Jim Crow may be dead but Jim Crow Jr. is still very much alive!" We went to a mortuary and got a small, white, child's coffin and put that on it, and four of us carried that coffin through the streets of Nashville and demanded that they lower the flags. And they did. I told my principal, "I won't be at school today." And he said, "I understand, Janice" and he cried. He was such a good man. We were beaten up by the police and we were arrested. (Laughter) But the NAACP got us out. And this is kind of silly but I'd just bought a brand new pair of loafers and I lost one of my new loafers. And when we went to Africa, the attorney, I don't remember his name and I'm sorry, but he sued the police. He asked us if we wanted to do it and we said, 'Well, all right.' At that time, it was a $1,000 he sued for which was a lot of money back in -- it was 1971 at that time. We were already in Africa because they had sent -- Bob Butts came around and asked if anyone wanted to join the Peace Corps. Well, I had already joined and I was assigned to Thailand but I was single. And then my husband wanted to go to Africa. He wanted -- they were offering Masters Degrees. So he wanted a Masters Degree, he had his B.S. Well, I already had one [from UCLA] but I said ok. So we decided that we would join the Peace Corps and we did. By that time we had adopted a son and he was two and half years old when we went to Liberia, West Africa.
DW Hmmm.
JG We were a country in the interior, 125 miles from the capitol city [Monrovia] which was named for our President James Monroe because you know it was settled in 1822 on an island called Providence and it was called Perseverance, later called Providence [in 1822]. It's a museum now. The people who landed there were people who came from, I think it was 23 states [of the US]. The fathers -- now all of these and I've forgotten the name -- Octoroon, or something like that, but they were children of slave masters and they didn't want their children to be slaves so they put them on a ship called the Good Ship Elizabeth right in the harbor place down here. {they were from] twenty-three states and they sailed to Liberia and they called it Liberia because it means the "love of liberty brought us here". And then later they moved from the island to the mainland. Unfortunately, they became almost what had happened here. The uh, what did we call them? The native people, but it was another name for that. They called themselves Americo-Liberians and sort of ruled over the people who were born there. Then of course, you know, later they killed most of the Americo-Liberians. Some of them were Christians and said that there was no fear. They couldn't understand why they didn't have fear because when you're a Christian you know where you're going. You know you're going to be with the Lord so you don't have the fear of death. I believe that He gives you peace somehow but they tied them to posts right there on the Atlantic Ocean and shot them. They had that in Life Magazine. I saw that later when I was visiting in Martinsville, Virginia.
But the president, William Tubman, he was president for life in Liberia. He went to Europe and was operated on and died. So naturally they had a State funeral. Many of the leaders, African leaders, came. Some of them were sent from the United States and some of the other European countries were represented. We were -- school was closed -- so we came from up country down to Monrovia. We had our son, Ben, with us. He had turned three by that time. And there was Haile Selassie! That was -- oh, that was marvelous to see. He was the only Emperor in Africa - Ethiopia. And he stood like this. His hands stretched like this which represented Ethiopia. Oh, he was such a stately man. He was kingly looking. He had bronze skin and I don't know if he had a beard or not, I had a picture of him. We said we wanted to have to take a picture and it's fortunate that we did because later he was assassinated. As you know, the Italians had taken over Ethiopia during the war and so he was on his knees praying and they had him get in the bed and they smothered him with a pillow.
The missionaries got all of the children out so there's still children living. You know the Bible says that God chose David but there would always be a member of his family on the throne. The women of his family were imprisoned but were released some years later. The Emperor, Haile Selassie, of Ethiopia traced his heritage right back to King David and no one denied that because they knew the lineage went straight back. King David -- what was the other king's name? -- Anyway, that is what King David looked like -- copper skin. He wasn't a tall man. He was about my height. He just, he was like this. Ah, that was one of the most important times in my life -- to have met the Emperor Haile Selassie, in person! There were many, many other leaders that we met.
The interesting thing is we were Peace Corps volunteers and you could actually go to like the White House, you could go to the king's palace and meet with him. We went to the daughter's wedding. We were Americans so I guess maybe that made us special. I don't know. People would ask us to come to their churches. They said big, big people like you we know. We were able to learn the language. You had to learn the [main] language of your village and it was called Kpelle. It was Pelly because it really started with a "K" and was (she makes a popping sound with her mouth). You made like a click sound and said [demonstrates how to make the sound of the word]. They do that in a country in South Africa as well. But the English couldn't say [again makes the Pelly sounds] and they could say [single popping sound] Pelly. So they left the "K" off and just called it Pelly. So we learned that and our son, as I said was two and a half [when we arrived]. We thought he couldn't really talk but he was speaking four languages of the children around him [Kpelle, Mano, Bassa and French]. My neighbor, Richard Flomo, was an attorney and Richard Flomo could talk to us in English; someone else would come up and he would speak to them in Bassa, and then someone else would come up and he would speak to them in Mano and then someone else would come up and he could speak French!
DW (Chuckles)
JG I mean the children, little kids, could speak languages and people call them dialects. They were languages. Liberia is about the size of Illinois and they had 23 languages. The school we went to was called -- later we went to Gboveh High and I taught Social Studies, English and what do you call it? -- [Woody taught] Physics. Calculus and several other things. Then when we went to Monrovia, we were at St. Theresa's Convent and that was an all-girls school. So we started a collegiate type program on the TV. I forget what they called it here but it's like "It's Academic" and our girls were champions. The thing about the kids there, all the youngsters, ah ... I wish our students could get it
they were so thirsty for knowledge.
DW Mmmhmm.
JG I never had a problem out of a student. Never. Not one. When we would come into the room, the classroom, this would be the tenth grade room, eleventh and twelfth. The teacher would move from room to room and when you came in, the students would stand up out of respect for the teacher. And they, the lowest IQ I had in the three years or actually four years but three years there was 91%.
DW Mmm.
JG I took them to the Supreme Court and they still wore the wigs like the British did and the kids, we walked there and then we went back the next day so they could see how the courts were [operated] … just experiences that they had not had. I tried to get a group together to bring to the United States, for them to go, but we weren't able to raise enough money. I probably should have written and asked if people would give us funds, you know. But that was quite an experience. The homes -- some of those people had the most gorgeous homes. One lady, Dr. Brown, who was my dentist, she'd been educated here [in the US]. She had a massive house and in the center of it, she had a -- I can't think of what you call it -- but in the middle of it, glass open at the top, she had like a botanical garden.
DW Atrium.
JG Right. In the middle of her home. And then they had other homes. They had some that were like grass huts that even though it was grass because they would make the roof out of palm leaves because the water would just go right off of that [the leaves]. But the house was gorgeous.
One day, I asked the girls to get permission slips from their parents to -- we were going somewhere I was taking them. So the girl said, "Well, I should bring it back tomorrow." She said, "Well, I can't. My mother went -- is not home." I said, 'Well, when she comes home." She said but my mom went shopping. I said, "Well, when she comes back from shopping." She said, "She won't be back for four days." I said, "Where did she go?" She said, "She went to Rome and Paris shopping." (Chuckles) I mean, just things like that.
We lived across, we lived on United Nations Drive, 1-1-1, right across the street from the Peace Corps office and the BMW - where they sold BMWs and Mercedes. And the Mercedes was a regular car for people there. (Laughter) Because the distance between, I think it was Italy and North Africa, was 8 miles. If you could swim you could probably swim that. But it was so interesting because of the things that people told you and I dressed like the people dressed. Just like this. People call it a turban or a wrap. We call it a "gele," [pronounces gaylay] but you could tell what country people were from by the way they tied their geles or head ties. Some would be done like this and what not. We were fortunate enough to go to oh, many, many nations there to visit … but anyway when we came back, Dr. Williams, Dr. Percy Williams, and his wife came to Liberia and he wanted to study the education[al system]. You know Monrovia is a sister city to Baltimore and he came to study the education. He knew we were there so he asked my mother and she told him to go to the Peace Corp's office. Well, we were right across the street, so they came over. We entertained them for several days. They didn't know it but they ate some snails (laughter) and Peace Corps loaned Woody a Mercedes truck and he took Dr. Williams up country to the different places of Gbarnga, and just -- Maryland County and things like that. Lots of places were named for places here [in Maryland] -- Randallstown, we went to church in Randallstown. And so when -- we came back in February -- and do you know Dr. Williams saved a job for my husband for three months. And when Woody came back, in three days later he had a job at the State Department of Education and he was made Chief of Equity, Assurance and Compliance and he stayed for 38 years and worked there. He made lots of friends, lots of good people. In the beginning I think he had something like about 20 employees and went down to 12 because they reduced it. But he stayed there and I do have to tell you. I filed a suit against Harford County to desegregate the schools. Mrs. Juanita Jackson Mitchell was the attorney,
DW What year?
JG 19 -- umm, I wasn't married.
DW Was this before Brown vs. The Board of Education or after?
JG It was after. It was probably 1960. It was 1960. 1960. And then I was told by my principal that I had to drop that suit. Dr. Willis, Charles W. Willis told my principal to do that. I guess they thought I was frightened but I was always bold because of my mom, her history and my dad. We just never learned to cower down. We weren't disrespectful, we weren't rude; we always had to call people Mr. or Mrs. But we always knew who we were and we always knew that we were not better than anyone but we were as good. I said, "Mr. Roye, that's not going to happen." He said, "Well, we will blackball you from state to state." You'll never get another job teaching. I said, "That's fine." I washed dishes, took care of children. It was an honest living. So because he said that, I had a cousin [Nathalian East Roberts] that worked at Coppin State. She was a librarian. She said, "Janice, come down. I'll get you an application and she did. Coppin wanted to hire me as a professor in their college. Then I went to Aigburth Manor in Baltimore County and I was hired both times in the same day to work in Essex. They said you would be the only colored person there.
But I just did that to show them I could get a job. So we went through. It was funny.
Then my husband and I filed a suit. Now all of these necessarily reached it was in Federal court but because they would settle, they all were not listed. I have a picture that was in the AFRO of my husband and I filing that suit. When he got out of the military, Harford County wouldn't hire him because of our civil rights activity. John Carroll offered him a job here and he went to Baltimore County. They [Baltimore County] offered to pay him to go to school to be a counselor because he got along so well with the young people. Now there were only two people of color at that school, Holabird, in Dundalk. As I said he was in the Reserves because he had been in the Army and had gotten out. I think eleven [five] years he spent. His commander said they were getting ready to send his unit not to Viet Nam but I forget what war was going on then, it might have been Viet Nam. And so, he said, if I were you, you're a college boy. He didn't mean any harm. He said, "If I were you, I'd go to school and take a course. They won't send you if you're in school." So he went straight to Johns Hopkins and took a course at Johns Hopkins. He was successful but that was after he learned that when we left here, he learned he was accepted at Meharry [Medical College]. And then of course, he resigned. I think it was three years he was at Holabird. And then I resigned and my friends said, "I know they're glad you're gone." But I had been, I don't know what you would call it, but because [my family and] I was in actually five suits in all and we have that in the book. We were on one case called the Christmas case. And Mrs. Mitchell wanted teachers, so Woody and I were also plaintiffs for that. And my mother filed a suit for her sons, [twins] Timmy and Tommy, to go to Aberdeen High School. Remember the Pettit case. That was the first. And then Ernestine Slade had one for her daughter, Roslyn. Then my sister filed a case against the Board for her two sons, Christopher Brown and Michael Brown. Both are military veterans now. But the entire time I was in this county, that sat [sent] the supervisor down, this is Violet Davis Merryman, she supervised me every day for thirty days [in an effort to wear me down or frighten me.]. You were only supposed to be supervised for 20 minutes so many days out of the year and we had evaluations that I kept in my file cabinet. They were all good. They had been taken out and changed. The idea was to make me look like a second class teacher so that I would get lower pay or to intimidate me to quit. And then one day she said to me, "You don't mind people watching you, do you?" I said, "No, I know what I'm doing." My teachers had taught me well at Bowie. And I said, "I just treat you like a piece of furniture. You're here. I know what I have to do and we had huge classes then because we were still segregated. In my first class I had 44 students in the third grade and the next year I had 48 in grades three and four [combined]. It was great. You learned to have different groups and direct the teachers. Some who had been my teachers helped you. Then did whatever they could to help you along. Later, they [supervisors and principals] did everything that they possibly could do to try to make me quit. Again, I left [when Woody was accepted at Meharry Medical]; taught in Tennessee for four years; we went to Texas Southern [University] -- Peace Corps paid for that. We got another Master's Degree. I got one in secondary education and Woody in Science and Biology. Then we went to the [African] continent and attended University of Liberia and I got a Masters in African History and Geography and about the people and the culture. And don't you know I came back after teaching there, four years [in high school] and I had substituted at Texas Southern [University] in English while a student, and we came back to the United States, back to Maryland, Woody was working at the State Department as I said. I went up to the Board of Education and Mr. C. Clark Jones was the Director of Personnel and I had searched and there were 78 jobs in elementary, middle and high and I qualified for all of them. And do you know he told me there were no jobs and there wouldn't be any for two years. I left. This is February and then I, somebody offered me a job at the YMCA but I didn't take that and I applied for unemployment. Well, August I was called to come up and sign a contract. So I went up and signed a contract. In the meantime, I said, "You know, I've never seen my certificate." (Teaching certificate.) He said, "Oh, I'll show it to you." So he had the secretary go in and pull it out. On my certificate in a brown arch, it said, "Valid to teach in colored schools only."
DW Hmm.
JG And so I went to a meeting in Baltimore with the Maryland Interracial Commission [under Rev. Dr. Douglass B. Sands]. I had worked with them. And it was Parren Mitchell. Parren Mitchell came after [Rev. Dr. Douglass B. Sands] uh, oh, I should have these names. But anyway, I got up and I mentioned this. And so it was all over the papers, Baltimore papers and what not. They had to change every certificate in the state of Maryland because it was discriminatory and you couldn't say that. Now they would not let me teach in high school because they said I needed one credit in Language Arts, Now I had a Master's Degree, (chuckles) I had three Master's Degrees. I got that, then I needed one in Economics. Well, I went to Harford Community on the Proving Grounds. So they said I needed something else in order to teach in high school and the State Department, whoever the official was, said "I see what Harford County's trying to do." Harford County had a bad name, a very bad name [in the state]. The Judge Rossum said Harford County has been in these courts more than all the counties combined -- ten times, I think it was, but I could be wrong. He said, "I don't want to see you come here again. I want you to desegregate those schools" or integrate, whichever they want to do. So I was punished for that, the entire … even after I returned they did the same thing. So they put me up at what they call Hickory; it used to be Central Consolidated and I was there three years in the sixth grade because they didn't have room in their middle school [Southampton] at that time. Finally, they let me go to Aberdeen High School but they would not -- now remember I was teaching tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades [in Africa] but they put me in the ninth grade. Anything, just to punish you.
Now Mr. Potter was not a bad principal. He really wasn't but the supervisor; he left much to be desired. So later there was a young man who didn't have tenure and they wanted [to] save his job, so they moved me from Aberdeen to Havre de Grace and there I had Dr. Thomas Dubel He was a great principal, he really was. He put me in the ten, eleventh, and … the first year I was teaching students who couldn't learn too well. [I was put on the 3rd
floor in a book room.] They were all seniors and God just blessed me with a gift to be able to reach young people and I love that and I love teaching. Every one of those kids graduated and Dr. Dubel called me into his office and he said, "Mrs. Grant, Mr. [Risby] called me. He didn't finish high school and his desire was for his son to finish. He said he was so happy that his son was graduating that he cried. And that just blessed my heart so. Then Dr. Dubel gave me eleventh and twelfth graders and I was teaching History then and so some of the other teachers didn't like it because they graduated the twelve grades and I have all this free time. So then again I was ostracized.
Then again it got to a point where I was over-supervised; they even wanted to take me out of the classroom. So what they did was, there was a little book room [on the 1st floor] and I had been in a little room before. In this little book room, they gave me a job [as a teacher to watch students do their work who had in-school suspension] that they have aides doing. Everything to make me look like I was not a competent teacher. The teachers would send the students there who were put out of class for whatever reason -- in-school suspension -- that's what it was called. And that was ok. They had a typewriter in there and I was president of the NAACP at that time. So the kids were doing their work in their little cubicles and I was busy doing my typing and what not. Then some of the teachers didn't like that because they had to do all this work and mark their papers and what not and rather than have a student aide go to the teachers' rooms to collect the work, they decided I needed to do that -- go from room to room. Now prior to that, it was getting so ugly that George Lisby, who I had gone to elementary school with him; I'd gone to high school with him; gone to Bowie with him; taught school with him at the [Havre de Grace] Consolidated School -I have to say something about George Lisby.
There's a school down here named George Lisby Elementary School -- Hillsdale. I'm not going to say it but after he died, I demanded that they name a school after him. Well, they called it -- I said "No. you're going to put his name on that school." And they did -- George D. Lisby. But that young man was a year behind me in Perryman
School. He had a photographic memory. His sister was a year ahead of me. He skipped three grades. When they would take him to the state meetings and then roll off these figures, the state department, you know what they were paying for this, this, and this. Dr. Williams would take George with him. He worked at the state department also. By the time they finished with the figures, just lines of them, George (snap of fingers) had the answer. And they asked Dr. Williams to stop bringing him because he was just too brilliant and he was like my son. There's not a word he cannot spell.
Well, when they couldn't get to me, finally Mrs. Mitchell had another [hearing at the Board] suit. Her husband came, Mr. Clarence Mitchell, Jr., a courthouse is named for him downtown, and they came to the [Harford County] Board of Education. She called him "her gun". (Chuckles) There was a suit that said they could no longer harass me -- some people say "ha-RASS". So when they couldn't get to me they got to my children. My daughter was in this school down here, so we took her out. Took my niece, my sister-in-law's three children and my sister's two and sent them to the Christian School up in Dublin. Then when my son was ready to go to school, first grade down here, there was a teacher that was in only her first or second year. Now he could read. He could read when he was three years old. He could spell. So she had alphabets so she put them in about five in disorder. And he just. "A-C-B-D". And she kept saying she wanted him to do them this way. And he went on and said them. She said, "I can't teach him." Well, he knew all of that. Then there was a teacher that volunteered to teach him in the first grade. They told her if she taught him she would lose her job. She told me later. So he had a tutor right here in this house, a minister from Swan Creek. He said, "Benjie isn't interested in this. He knows how to read, he knows how to spell; he can count." So my girlfriend, one of my roommates from Bowie, talked about a school. He was called autistic and they think autistic children are stupid. It's just the opposite. So we put him there and he said, "Mom, I don't belong on this hall" [at the Forbush School]. So, finally we put him in a private school. My mother knew a minister who had a school down here in Joppa and he went to school there [at Faith Baptist School]. They had what they called paces and the kids could move at their own pace. He and I would be up sometimes two, three o'clock in the morning going through them. Then he learned to do it on his own.
He went from one grade to the other, rapidly. Then he said, "Mom, I want to go to school like Grace does." We had adopted a girl from Liberia and she finally was at Aberdeen High [Middle] School. So we sent him to the middle school when she was still at the other school because they wouldn't take him. They had a little problem with the color of our skin also. And they didn't want black males [mixing with non-black females].
DW What year is this?
JG I can't remember what year it was. I wish I had written these things down. Grace graduated in '86 and he graduated in '87. So it was somewhere in the [seventies or] eighties; that's all I can say.
DW Wow.
JG So we did send him to the middle school. I went during American Education Week and Shirley Rose was the principal there at that time -- a black female. And there he was sitting in the library with a paper and crayon. I asked the aide, I said, "How long have you been here?"
And she told. I said, "How long has he been here?" And she said, "He was here when I came." I marched right down, found out why he wasn't in class, went to the principal (and asked) "Why isn't he in class?" (She said) "Well, I don't know," But it seems as if they were told "he can't learn." Because he had been labeled as a non-learner. So I had taught with Florence Stansbury and Mrs. Mildred Stansbury was the counselor. She had taught me and I had worked with her at Aberdeen High School. So Florence said, "Janice, I'll teach him." Well, they didn't have any, they didn't bother the Stansburys. That was a big name in Havre de Grace, Dr. George Stansbury, Dr. Clayton Stansbury and Mr. Stansbury had worked in civil rights himself, Mr. Clayton and the Bransfords and what not. So there were certain people they did [not] try to give any trouble to. So Florence took Ben and took him into her class -- they had open classrooms then. There was a little Caucasian girl. She was so sweet. She worked with him to bring him up to where they were. I wish I knew her name. Then when he took a test and what not, he passed every one of them. Then when he went to high school, a teacher -- and I am so sorry I didn't right that name down. She was in her second year and she was teaching Ben. She refused to give him bad grades. She was told to give him failing grades. She would not do it. She gave him A's and B's. She said he knows the work. You know they wouldn't give her tenure? But she, in my writings, I'm putting all these names and I regret now that I don't have that. But maybe I can add them later, you think?
DW Yea, you can do a supplement.
JO Oh, great.
DW You can't edit the checks but you can do a supplement.
JO Oh, I'll certainly give those people -- I believe in giving honor where honor is due and giving credit where credit is due.
DW So, '54 was Brown vs. The Board of Education. Harford County Schools took twelve [ten] years to get fully integrated. '65 -'66 was the first --
Jo They would not have done it then
DW official
JO if Dr. Willis had his way.
DW Mmm hmm, So, you're talking about the eighties, so even though things were fully integrated in '65 -'66 school year, there is still this kind of problem going on in the eighties?
JO Yes, and I have to say this to you. In court, Dr. Willis in on the stand and Mrs. Mitchell was a superb, brilliant lawyer and she asked him about why he had this -- I guess I'll call it -- restraint against black teachers and he said he did not believe that a black teacher was equal to a white teacher. He said that he didn't think that black teachers could teach white children. They would have to have special classes to us how to teach white children. Special classes to even teach us how to talk. I don't know where this idea came from. Or who he knew.
DW Let's take a break.
So before the break we were talking about the fact that the first fully segregated school year was '65 -'66, yet there were still things going on well into the eighties. And while the camera was off, you were talking about sections of Harford County that are still very white.
JO Right and there were students who should have gotten scholarships and didn't, depending on whether or not the Council wanted them to. I remember one incident in particular. This was not a -- I think she was Puerto Rican and she and another girl were pretty much tied -- this was Havre de Grace High School -- for the valedictorian. And they made it as though she had just like one little point less; like running a race. You know, I used to be an athlete and in all the races and what not, whoever, you know, breaks that rope first and it can be what? Just a mini-second or so. But they did that to keep her from getting the top. I wonder how she must of felt, you know? But it's things like that and then the grades. There were some good teachers. Excellent teachers. There are teachers, even to this day -- I went to the meeting last night, town meeting; there was a teacher, a Social Studies teacher at Aberdeen when I was a Social Studies teacher and I know he hated me. It didn't bother me that was on him. But to this day, he doesn't want to speak and that's ridiculous. I've been retired and he's retired but I just make him speak. "Hi, Bill, How are you." (Chuckles) And he's just like frozen.
But I remember the things the teachers used to do. Mr. Bill Taylor, he's passed away now but he would collect me at my home, the old house that we no longer have and Cora and George and drive us all to school. We were just starting. We didn't have any money to buy a car and he became very ill and I went to visit him at the hospital. He told me, "Janice, I didn't want to retire when I did but I retired because I wouldn't do to you what they wanted me to do." They had sent me from Aberdeen, as I said to save this young man's job but he didn't lose because he wasn't good but because he just didn't have the years -- but they thought Dr. Dubel wouldn't be a good principal and he was excellent. So they moved Dr. Dubel -- he said, "Janice, do you want to go back to Aberdeen?" I said, "No, I like it here." -- [So Dr. Dubel was moved] to Aberdeen High School and brought the man who had been my supervisor [Ronald Webb] who really did not write good things about me and made him principal at Havre de Grace so that he would do the job that the others hadn't done. So Bill was, Bill Taylor, William Taylor was the assistant principal and he said, "I retired." One day I came to school and they had him write a letter. We were due there at 7:15. The letter said, you were due here at 7:15. You got here at 7:16, so that was a mark against me there. Just different, different, things.
And the kids would come to me, come to my room because they knew I was a Christian and they would ask me to pray for them and I would. They would come to my room to have prayer. I didn't lead because the law had said it had to be student led. We had what was called prayer around the pole. I don't if you've heard of that or not but there was a time when the students would get out and pray around the pole for this country. Bill said, "Janice, every day there were two teachers there who (I won't say) but two females. Every day they come to me, they question your students to find out what you teach and they would tell me. "Well, she talked about the Bible and she talked about this and that..." Well, when I taught History, the Lord Jesus Christ is in History -- Jerusalem, Israel -- and I taught about that, Yes, I did. But they thought it was terrible. I didn't preach but I didn't shy away from talking about the Lord and what not. I had been to Israel, I had seen the places and what not, walked where Jesus walked and things like that and I have to say I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ because he said clearly, "If you deny me before men, I will deny you before my Father who is in Heaven." I don't want to be denied when the day comes when He calls me. But everything possible that was done was done. Bill said, "I just went on and retired. I was not going to write up negative reports about you." So then later they had a principal who he and I both had worked on our doctorates together. They were free. University of Maryland was giving them and all you had to do was do the work. They made him principal, Jon Andes, and as I say, he had been a social studies teacher with me. He was fair, very fair. So Jon wouldn't do what they wanted. They brought a black man in who had been at the State Department of Education with my husband, [James Bennett]. He knew my husband and they brought a woman in who lived over here on Rogers Street. She did everything she could to destroy me. I just listened to her. When she finished, I'd get up and go. They finally, she was so negative toward me, they gave her a job in the central office. (Laughter) I didn't say you wouldn't have that job if I hadn't filed a suit for teachers to be hired and promoted. That was a suit I had filed alone. But I didn't say that. And really it wasn't me, it was God. Later this fellow they brought in -- and then they brought another woman in of color. She was brilliant. She's passed away. She began and two teachers said to her, "You better leave that woman alone. She's a Christian." And she did. She understood but the principal -- I don't want to say what his -- anyway, he had been promised a job in the central office if he would write me up either to give me a second class certificate or fired. James Bennett was his name. James Bennett did everything he could. The kids would say -- I would leave my door open -- I didn't have anything to hide. The kids would go to the bathroom and come back and say, "Mrs. Grant, Mr. Bennett, the principal is behind your door listening." They had the PA System on and I could hear when it would click off and on. So he called me into his office one day. I was teaching History as I said, -- Social Studies and I was telling students it was what they called Black History month. I said Beethoven was a black man. His teacher Hayden was a black man. Well, they came and said the music teacher said Beethoven wasn't. I said, "They make him look white but he was a black man." The principal called me in his office. I was "teaching wrong." Dah, dah, dah, and so forth -- I said, "Well, I know a little bit about History. I know a little bit about -- I Beethoven was a black man." "Well, there are people that write things wrong" and what not. Then I told him about some other things. I said, "Do you know who settled the differences between the Arabs and the Jews, who are cousins by the way?" Abraham is the father of both the Arabs and the Jews. You know that. It was Sarah and Hagar. Hagar was the maid. They didn't have children. She told Abraham to go in with the maid, anyway -- Hagar's children are the Arabs and the others are the Jews. So they're cousins but they're warring. So Dag Hammarskjöld was the under Secretary or Secretary at that time of the United Nations and he was killed in a plane crash. The man under him, next in line like the vice president would be, was Ralph Bunch. Ralph Bunch was a black man. So in 1948, Ralph Bunch settled at that time, the dispute between the Arabs and the Jews and Israel became a nation for the first time since the Biblical times, in 1948. And that was a black man but that's not taught. But I taught it and he was telling me that -- now he's the principal -- that I was teaching things that were not true. I said, "Well, I learned a few things since my Mom taught me." She was educated in Philadelphia and she knew some things. She always taught us as much black history as she could.
Mr. Roye had gone to Lincoln University and Langston Hughes was a classmate of his. Langston Hughes was a very famous poet and also one of his favorite stories was named Simple and he wrote "Simple Speaks His Mind". Langston Hughes would come to that little -- it's still there in Havre de Grace on Alliance and Stokes Street -- to that colored school in the basement with his books. Many times he would come and visit and read his poems to us and his stories and what not. We didn't even know that this was a great writer, author. All we knew was that it was Mr. Roye's classmate and he came to us to do that. But we were privileged. We had a librarian, Mrs. Mildred Stansbury, who helped my son when they were trying to discredit him. She said, "No, look at his grades. He's doing well. And you ought to hear him quote the Bible." But she went to the Board and asked them about a library and they said. "Well, you need to have a librarian." She said, "Well, I'm the librarian." And she got the first library for us. There was a lady named Frances Brown. I didn't know her but she had a collection of rare black books and the books covered one whole half of the library and then the other side. Rare books. And when we desegregated in 1965, Dr. Willis ordered Mr. Roye to burn those books. Burn those books! They opened the little chute and started shoving -- I just grabbed books and grabbed books, as many as I could. Can you imagine that?
There was one book that would tell you how you could identify, possibly identify, the tribe that you came from in Africa. Certain characteristics like they called him Wilt the Stilt, the basketball player? He was from the Watusi group in East Africa. Then of course you had people like this -- I can't think of his name -- the boxer who has -- but anyway, there were just certain characteristics you could this was before DNA. Of course, you have DNA now. You can find out that you're part this and part that. My great-grandfather's mother was Jewish/Irish. And he somehow, she and a Mulatto mated up anyway, and he was born. He was sent out from the family at nine years of age to go -- this was Newport News, Virginia, to go to Richmond to find his dad. He never found him but when he came back he had enough money and he bought two whole streets and he owned houses in Richmond; houses in Newport News. He, there was no place to bury black people in Newport News and so he had a dairy and went to the townspeople and told them he needed pastureland for his cows. They didn't believe in banks. You know a lot of old people didn't. My mother called him "Papa". James East was his name. So he bought 20 acres, paid for them in cash and he [set up] the first cemetery for black people. It's had several different, different names but Jim researched that. I have pictures. Now there's a tombstone in the center of it that says "James East" and it tells where he lived, it's on Shell Road, and what he had done and things like that, to his honor. And I'm trying to now, hopefully, get money with my cousins -- one in New York and one in Virginia -- to get that place cleared because it's overgrown now. That's disrespectful to have a cemetery that … and I am hoping to go down there and get some of the boy scouts and other people to come and just clean up the place. They used to do that.
My mother always has -- just like this house. She started the church right here as I said, in the living room then down in the basement. And Ernestine here was the first to and still is the treasurer of that church, which of course later the church bought a day room from the Proving Ground and that was the church they called Aberdeen Bible Mission in the beginning because they [the town] said there wasn't enough land.
But my step-grandfather's sister, my Godmother had given the land to my mother. He had left it to her, my grandmother. Mom asked grandmom if she could buy it. Woody and I went with her and we helped and got the land and later they purchased additional land where a lady -- I think she was Miss Amanda -- had had a store, and they built this really, I think, nice church at the end of Edmund Street called Aberdeen Bible Church now. It's just a lot of history and things [that were not written].
I remember one night, Vivian, Carol and I were coming from the movies and we shouldn't have done this but Mom didn't let us, allow us to go to the movies, because it was segregated. She'd take us to Baltimore with my aunts and cousins, but we snuck in and went up. When we came out to go home we were chased by some soldiers. We ran and hid under the hedges and what not. But that was one unpleasant incident.
I don't really have that many good, good memories of things that occurred other than when we would get together as groups. I have a friend I grew up with, Barbara Christy McCain, who just lost her son. Great friends! But we all mingled together and I can't think of anyone -- Oh yes! I have two friends, Carol Preston and another girl who lived on the edge here, and we would play together. I went to school in the first grade and I said to my mother, I said, "Mom, Carol and (I can't remember her name) they weren't in school. We were all the same age. All should have been in first grade. And that's when she told me about segregation. And I remember my brother, Jerry, my youngest brother; he had a friend, Jimmy Tobin. The Tobins owned a lot here in Aberdeen at one time. Jimmy and Jerry were friends. Jerry came home from school, first grade, and he said the same thing. He said, "Janice, Jimmy wasn't in school today." And that's when I told him about segregation. It really affected him. I don't know, it just did something to him. He looked at his arms and he looked in the mirror and he couldn't understand why he couldn't be treated like the others. He did, of course, eventually go to Aberdeen High School because things had been settled by then.
DW Did Harford County -- was there any other county in Maryland that drug their feet as much as Harford County?
JG No, Harford County was THE only one.
DW The only one.
JG Some counties like Baltimore City--BAMl Immediately. As I said I had relatives who went to school there. Still some of them wanted to stay at their own schools and still some people -- when they had the freedom of choice, when you could sign up your child and they could go -- they called it the Pilot Program. Two black teachers went to the schools: Florence Stansbury and Mrs. [Bernice] Williams. I told you about the Stansbury name and the Williams name. Dr. Percy Williams' wife, Mrs. Bernice Williams, and then of course, Florence [Stansbury], Mrs. Williams and then later Christine Tolbert was chosen. She and Dr. Williams were cousins. I'm not taking anything away from her, she was a good teacher. She had gotten a Masters also. It was step by step, gradually, then finally as Ernestine is saying, it was '65 and they let us chose the school we wanted to go to. So I chose Hall's Cross Roads, right over here in Aberdeen. There was a black principal there, Mr. Mears. He was excellent. I was only there one year, '65-'66, because in '66 we moved to Nashville. And I didn't teach here again until we came back from Africa. And they STILL, still had that animosity. I was being used as an example to the other black teachers to teach them: This is what will happen to you. Don't you know, it worked? Not anyone else. Now one teacher, Gerry Washington, she was subpoenaed. She didn't want to come and then the -- not principal, I guess you would say principal -- President of Coppin State College, they subpoenaed him so that ... and asked him, "Did you really hire Janice Grant?" He said, "Yes, she was qualified. I hired her." He didn't want to come because he was concerned about his job. But when you are subpoenaed, you know what that is, you have no choice. Then they subpoenaed Christine Tolbert. She said, "Well, I've been subpoenaed so I guess I have to testify." But Anna Brashears, my husband and myself, we were plaintiffs. As I say, he was punished and they wouldn't give him a job but the interesting thing is, after he was hired by the state department and was working there, Harford County sent him an application to come back and teach in Harford Count. They were concerned because there was George Lisby, Dr. Williams and Woody and that they deny Title 1 and Title 9 to the county and they wouldn't get the funds. They thought my husband would be as evil to the county as they were to him and to me, But I never, except for Jon Andes and Dr. Dubel, I was under scrutiny, over-supervised, never could satisfy anything, you walked in school, you never knew what you would meet. I had a program, as I told you, I had been in the Peace Corps, and I had designed it for a youth or student volunteer program and wrote it up. My idea was for the students to go out and help the elderly people and to do things that were needed. The principal would not let me implement that program. He would not let me do that program. Don Osman came to me and asked me, he bent down at my desk and said, "I would like to help you with your student program. Now he had shown it to him and I didn't trust him to be honest with you because of other things that had occurred. I said, "No, I'd like to do the program myself." I knew what I wanted to do. The principal told me, he said -- his name is Ronald Webb -- he said, "No, you can't take the kids out of class, you can't keep them after school which was a lie because that's exactly what Osman did. Then I had another program. I went to Jessup -- the warden at the time was female. It doesn't make any difference and it was a program called "Scared Straight." I didn't invent that but it was going on. I thought it would help the kids who were busy not doing what they should. She said sure, she'd be glad to have the students come and have the inmates or what not work with them. Wouldn't let me do that. Then after I left, they put someone else there. Had another program to help the mothers because in Africa I had helped the mothers to learn to do certain things for their children's health and what not adult education and things like that because I had done that in Mississippi in the Freedom Schools. I taught, of course they made me a principal because I was a teacher. Most of the people were younger students from Kent State and different places like that. We went all over Mississippi, speaking to the people, registering voters and trying to stay alive.
One girl, white girl, was walking -- we were told never ever to go out by ourselves. I had a car. I drove to Mississippi, there and back. But she decided she wanted to go. You know some young people don't believe people can really be as evil as they are. So she just went walking down the street and four white guys came by in a car and they said you know we killed some black men, dumped them in the Tallahatchie River, the Pearl River and there was another river which was their favorite to put black people in. And so they said, we never killed a white woman. So they put a rope around her neck and started driving and then they drove even faster and faster and she ran. And they laughed and finally let her loose. She said, "I urinated on myself." She was so frightened.
Then of course, I came out of my school one day and there were three guys coming toward me with a crowbar and as I said, I had a car. Very slowly I backed to my car and jumped in my car and took off! And I out ran the KKK but I came home with a bullet hole in the rocket panel of my car. There were different incidences, you know. You were just trying to keep alive. And as I said, they burned the church in Philadelphia, Mississippi and we went to the church. And Hallelujah! We put a chair on the embers. I mean they burned it to the ground. I wish I'd had a camera. But a lady sat on top of those embers and she sang "Freedom Is a Constant Struggle" Oh, my. just to hear her wail, it went right into your spirit. Then we had what they called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Mississippi went [to the convention] and the black people had no vote so Fanny Lou Hamer, very famous person, used to go to the different towns and preach to the people and tell them, "You get out there and vote. We'll go with you." "You register." At that time they would make them try to recite the Constitution and some of the people who were registering them couldn't do it themselves. I remember Rev. Lee went to register and don't you know they let him register and shot him to death on the courthouse steps? Oh there were some awful, awful things that happened. As I say that morning when they found Mickey and Andy and Jimmy we froze when we saw the picture on TV because they were our friends.
Now the idea of killing them -- they called Mickey a nigger lover because he had been there two years -- they shot Andy, I mean immediately! And Jimmy, they put him against a tree and chained him and whipped him with chains. And when they did the autopsy, they said every bone in his body was crushed. Two of the doctors regurgitated. They'd never seen anything like it. Now Andy had the soil clutched in his hand and perhaps he hadn't really died totally and maybe he was trying to dig his way out because it wasn't dirt that had fallen in his hand, it was clutched in there as if he had been digging.
The good news is, I went down in 2014, as I said for our 50th year reunion, and I had a good friend. The FBI grounds has a huge steel plaque with their names on it: Michael ["Mickey" Schwerner], James Chaney, and Andy Goodman. Now when they were to be buried, the other two were Jewish. They would not -- the Jewish mothers came down for Jimmy's funeral there in Mississippi and they wanted their sons to be buried there with him but they wouldn't let them be buried there so they had to take the bodies back to New York. And my friend Susan Butler, she was a teacher in New York. She came later because she had a course she had to study for her teaching. She said she got on the same plane to go to Mississippi that they had brought Mickey's body back and Andy's body back on. She was one of the teachers in my [Freedom] school and she and I are friends to this day. Now we had lost contact. Let me tell you how she found me.
The old house here [on Edmund St], as I said, they were going to bulldoze it and they had it on the Internet -- the picture of the house and all that and the story. And her son was searching the internet and she said he came upon where it said "Janice Grant, Aberdeen, Maryland" and he told his mother because she had been trying to find me for [50] years. We lost contact because I was in Tennessee, then I was in Africa, you know, and Texas. So she wrote me a letter. She said, "I found you! It's Susan." I said I have to have a last name, I didn't, you know, "Susan."
So finally she sent me a picture and she reminded me and when we were down in '64, we roomed together in a hotel that we couldn't have stayed in before when we were there. (Laughter) We visited the COFO Office where Bob Moses had his office. COFO stood for Council of Federated Organizations. We had a SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating [Committee], we had NAACP, we had CORE -- Congress of Racial Equality -- and SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference], Dr. King's group. We all joined together to fight segregation. Skin color didn't mean anything. Who cared what color you were? We had one friend, Ursula Junk, who had come from Germany. There were some Europeans that had come to fight segregation. I had a car so we all -- nobody would feed us, so we decided to go to another state [town] to try and find out if we could be fed. But before we went to visit a professor at Ole Miss -- James [Silver] (I'll have to put this in the supplement). One of the boys had written him to ask can I visit you. He had written this book, "Mississippi: The Closed Society". So I drove up and of course, Ole Miss is great now. You know, it has -- you know that story that you -- the black football player [Michael Oher] that used to be here on the Orioles [Ravens] team? What was the name of that movie? [The Blind Side] It's recent. But anyway, this white family took him in and all.
James Silver was his name. [He wrote] Mississippi: The Closed Society. So he let us come in and he entertained us in his home at Ole Miss and said they had to sleep on their floor at night -- he and his children and his wife because they would shoot into these homes because he had exposed Mississippi. (A jolly little ring tone interrupted the talking. I won't answer because it's interfering, isn't it? (Laughter) Will you answer it for me?)
DW Well, just let it go to voice mail and I'll cut this part out. (Laughter)
JG (Laughter) Oh, it's in my jacket. (Laughter)
DW There ya go.
JG Wouldn't you know? Let me see. I don't know if it was my husband or not. Well, we don't know. It doesn't matter because he knows where I am. Ok. (Chuckles)
DW I think the time is going to be getting pretty short on the recorder as it is.
JG All right. I wanted to tell you what happened to us on the road, going up. We -- nobody would serve us. It was because of me. And one of the boys said, "Janice, I can't believe this that nobody will serve you."
So on the way back, there was a huge Great Dane in the road. (Smacks hands together). My car hit it and burst the radiator and all the water came out. Couldn't drive. So a group came by and they were going to give the kids a ride. They saw me and they said, "We're going to come back and get you all because you got a nigger with you." So a black family came by and picked them up and took them into Jackson and said they would send somebody back for me. So they put me in the trunk of my car so they couldn't find me when they came back. And they couldn't find me but the interesting thing is: they didn't burn the car. So the next day Bob sent someone up to get the car and actually paid to get the radiator fixed and went to -- wasn't supposed to go to this garage, There were only certain ones you were to go to but I needed gasoline and I just went to this one. And this white man, he was so kind, so nice to me. It was like he wanted to say, "I'm not like that. I don't feel that way towards you." But that was a rare moment because most of the time you got the "n" word and spit on and things like that and they could have killed us all, they would have. But they killed the boys thinking that that would make us all leave. Many of the students had come for like two weeks, maybe three weeks, and we all got together in the COFO office and said we will not leave. That just made us determined that we were going to stay. Bob asked me if I would stay and work with them for the rest of the years when I had just gotten married -- just one year -- and my husband didn't want to come because he said, "Janice, I can't be non-violent." He said I did that in college but if they come to me, I'm afraid I'm going to have to do something. And they had a group they called, a group of black men, who had rifles and all. I want you to know where I lived, there were six of us and the lady's name was Marge Shank. We lived in the Verdant Addition. They had what they called "safe homes" and every single night one black man would stand guard over us, in case anyone came to harm us because they were white people in a black neighborhood. It was just amazing that -- 11 some … everyone wasn't frightened. There were people willing to risk their lives and they were running out of money because they had to pay these people to feed us and for us to stay in their homes and they were all poor people. Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and the little short fella that used to sing, Sammy Davis, Jr. Well, they flew to Mississippi and I think the first thing they brought was -- I don't know if it was $20,000 or $60,000 -- and gave it to Bob when they found out they were running out of money. Then Pete Seeger -- have you ever heard of him? Ahh, I loved him. Pete Seeger came and entertained us at Tugaloo [College]. That was our home base, Tugaloo and he sang, you know.
(Doug sneezes.) Bless you. Peter, Paul and Mary came and they sang "How many roads must a man go down before they call him a man?" Or whatever. Then there was a show on TV called Room 222 and this actress came down and the whole play and I bought a record of it but my mother-in-law threw it away, and (Doug coughs.) You need you water, don't you?
DW Sorry.
JG Oh, that's all right. The play was called "In White America" and they were talking about all the things that they were doing against black people. And one thing -- remember we were registering voters because they didn't want black people to vote and the girl on the record said, "Pa says if the black man ever got the right to vote, and black people got in office, Pa said that's the thing we have to fear most." And look. Look what has happened because black people have the right to vote. And it annoys me when people will not go out and vote. I say if you don't vote, you don't have any right complaining.
We had lots of famous people who would come and entertain us. I remember Harry Belafonte. They were in a hotel, of course, they let them go. They were famous people and they had money. One of them said, "Who's gonna sleep on the side by the door?" (Laughter) Because they didn't know what may happen, you know. But they came. He didn't come once. Harry Belafonte came more than once and brought money. I don't think know about that to help. You had people like Lena Home and the fella who played in the Godfather. During the march on Washington, they all came and they came to help, so it was never a black-white thing, fortunately. There was never a "Hey, I don't like white people" because we weren't reared that way. We have plenty of them in our family now that are so-called white people because I always say Race, Black Race, White Race, Brown Race, Red Race, Yellow Race. I said there's only one race called "human." One blood and one color, just different shades of brown. Every human being on earth came from Adam and Eve. We're related. God created one man, Adam, and we all know about the floating rib. And, of course, we know about the flood, Noah and his sons, where did all these other troubles come from? Well, if you know history, you know why you have these different shades. You have the Garden of Eden, we know was partially in Africa. We know that there are two rivers that still remain today, still called the Tigris and the Euphrates in Iraq. Then the other river, the great river, the Nile, it came right on down. We don't know how they got separated but there are three Niles, all one river. At the mouth, it's the White Nile, the Blue Nile and then the Nile and that was one of the rivers of the Garden of Eden. It's right there in Africa today. There's so much. Then you go to Greece and Turkey and there's more about the Bible there than there is in Jerusalem and Israel because that's where the Isle of Patmos where John went in the cave and God gave him the Revelation and he wrote it. And you can still see some things on the cave there. Then you have the gravesite of two of the disciples, there, not in Jerusalem, not in Nazareth but in Greece and Turkey. And Turkey, you know is the only nation that's on both continents Asia and Europe of all the nations. And they don't call it Europe, and they don't call it Asia; they call it Eurasia over there because Europe and Asia are connected. There is no separation between them. The only separation between Europe and Asia is the Ural Mountains and you cross over into the other. So they say, no, no there is no Europe. There's Eurasia. So I learned to do that.
While we were there I had a radio program as well as a TV program. The radio program was called "ELWA", Eternal Love Winning Africa. Then I also had a program over Voice of America and it spanned the three continents. It was a biblical program trying to lead people to the Lord Jesus. God just blessed us and God used us. I said He could have used anyone on earth but for some reason He chose us. The Bible says He takes the simple things of the world to confound the wise. (Laughter) I guess that was us -- the simple things. I like my state, I like my county and I would love to be able to do things. Fortunately, there are many good people here, many, many good people. I can go to any restaurant I want to, I could possibly buy -- now, this house was built in 1960 and for 13 years no one would -- it was the only house on the block -- no one would build on this side or that side because black people lived here. 1960, my mother and stepfather lived here alone all those years. Then they built this over here, we went to look at it? And the man tried to force us to buy it because we looked at it. And Vernon Terry said no, got something from the five and dime calling it a contract. Then we built our house and then you can see all the other houses here. But there are only three houses -- two when we moved here. We've been here in that house, mmm, I think it was 1979 -- Isn't that awful? I don't even remember when we built our house. (Chuckles) But we've been here for 35 years; I can go back and subtract it. (Laughter)
DW Thirty-five years would be about 1981.
JG Well, I think it was -- my mom died in '89, so we came -- it was'79, so it's been a little longer than that because we lived up in the apartments up there [in Aberden above Ollie's].
DW Mmmhmm.
JG But that's -- many good things happened. I said there's the Greene's -- Montgomery, Roger... Now his family was historical. Abraham Lincoln gave a huge, massive silver plate and silver set to him because John Rogers -- if you know your history -- and then you had -- there are buildings in Washington named for Meigs Greene. He opened the gateway to the East, China. You know the Great Wall of China, they closed themselves off. They were a part of that great naval family. Mrs. Greene was one of the persons who started that school up in Bel Air which is a private school. I can't think of the name of that school either.
DW Harford Day?
JG Harford Day.
DW Mmmhmm.
JO They wanted their children to have a different education. I think Meigs did go to the public school for a year or so until they started Harford Day. But you know the kids go on trips and things like that. When I taught school, I was blessed here; the military would give us buses and what not to take the kids. So I took the kids to Philly to see the uh -- you know that's like our nation's history began there -- the Liberty Bell, Constitution Hall, and those things; some of those kids had never even been across the Susquehanna Bridge.
DW Oh, wow.
JG I have a Jewish friend who for two years she worked to get us to the Holocaust Museum and that day the principal, James Bennett, got on the bus and cancelled the trip.
DW Hmm.
JG He wanted to make sure I didn't have anything that I did, you know, that they could say you did things and what not. But I would have speakers to come in from different places and the Proving Ground asked me to come and bring the African artifacts and things, much of which many people have stolen. They sent buses from the Proving Ground to Aberdeen High School for our students to go free. You know the principal [Mr. Potter] would not let the kids go to see that.
DW Hmm.
JG Before I taught, before they gave me a job, some teacher at Havre de Grace High School asked me if -- I think it was Grace, Grace Spry -- to come and bring some artifacts and clothes and show them to the children and I did. Bill Taylor came and he was kind of, you know, black people thought: Africa, grass skirts and burning people in pots and all that and when he came and he saw the beautiful homes and the gasoline stations and the kids and the schools and what not, he said, "It was a nice program, Janice. (Laughter) It was nothing to be ashamed of." And they said to me, "You mean you're going to take your child to Africa?" I said, "They have children in Africa." (Laughter) Oh, boy.
DW Well, like I said, I think the machine is getting towards the end. JG Right.
DW So we really do need to wrap up. Maybe I will get some pictures of some pictures as we finish here. I'd like to thank you very much for your time and interesting history.
JG Oh, sure.

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Transcript

Harford Living Treasure Series
An Oral History by
JANICE E. M. GRANT
26 April 2016
Harford Living Treasure Janice East Moorehead Grant
Interviewer: Doug Washburn = DW
Interviewee: Janice East Moorehead Grant = JG
Hello, this is Doug Washburn for the Harford County Public Library. Today is 26 April 2016, and I'm with Harford Living Treasure Janice Moorehead Grant of Aberdeen.
DW How are you, ma'am?
JG I'm blessed. I like to say Janice East Moorehead Grant.
DW Oh! OK.
JG East is my mother's maiden name. She put that in there. I use it.
DW (Chuckles) So, you were born in Aberdeen?
JG Born in Aberdeen on this very property on Edmund Street and I guess Edmund Street - well, you just walk straight from [Law St] on up to the other end. As I said earlier, this property was purchased by my great-grandmother, Mary Cook now - Mary Banks Cook, and also her two daughters. One daughter was my grandmother and that's Mary East Lawson and then the other was her sister, Georgiana Virginia Turner. They were all born in Aberdeen in what they call Mount Calvary but one, Georgiana, was born in Paradise. Paradise Road runs through that area but it no longer exists as Paradise. It's part of Aberdeen now. And she was the one that Jim became interested in because she had worked for the Roosevelts. In '29 she went there, answered an ad and went to work for him when he was governor at Hyde Park. Then after he became President- you know he served four terms or started the fourth. And during the war, Aunt Jo - as we called her, the family - Aunt Jo asked for a leave and became a nurse and helped with the war efforts of World War II. Then she worked at several hospitals in New York. Then when Mrs. Roosevelt became ill and she knew that they couldn't cure her, she called her back to be with her as a private nurse. She was there when Mrs. Roosevelt passed away and she was in her will. We have a copy of that will. Of course, there were a lot of people that she left something to. But Aberdeen did recognize it and put in the papers there in the Aberdeen Room Museum and also the JET Magazine. Jim became interested and he found out so much history that we didn't even know existed.
DW Hmm.
JO I think he found a five page history about our [Aunt] Jo, where she had talked about her time with the Roosevelts. She never boasted, never said anything, she was just Aunt J0 to us. Just a regular - and Ernestine knew her as well. She lived in a house that's up on the other end of this property - Edmund Street. I don't know if you heard about it but Aberdeen tried to demolish it and Jim was instrumental in helping us to save that house. He - it's just a miracle of God - he walked in the Historical Society, well, he visits there often as you probably know. He's quite an historian. He's a retired Social Studies teacher just like I am. But he said he was there on a Saturday. Now Aberdeen was going to demolish the house on Monday at 8 a.m. and the offices don't open until 8:30. So Judge Carr, William O. Carr, walks in and says "Jim, what's up?" and he told him all about the house - 411 Edmund Street, the history of Aunt Georgianna and then the other things, the Freedom Riders and all that. And the NAACP used to meet there because my cousin, Walter Banks, had been president of the NAACP for more than 30 years and my mother worked with him. There were other things we did in that house but Mrs. Roosevelt visited the house. That helps make it historical. She visited the Aberdeen Proving Ground to visit the troops. She was a very, very active First Lady. She knew the family because we had been to Hyde Park and we were all at the Inauguration. We got invitations from the President because our family believed it was important for you to know that. We'd bundle up all warm and go there and sit. So she knew that Aunt Jo lived at that house; she had come to visit. When she retired she lived there as well. So that was part of the history he told Judge Carr. Judge Carr said to Jim - and he can verify it - "You tell them my office will be open for them at 7 o'clock." So a wonderful lady who ran for Attorney General, Aisha Braveboy, volunteered to be our attorney pro bono and she did and she's excellent. She's in the Maryland Legislature and has been for some time. Excellent attorney. So she and I were up all night making the affidavits and all the - well, she knew what to do, I didn't as far writing one. I went and asked for an injunction, and they didn't give it to me. They were biding their time. So she had one hour of sleep and she came down [from Prince Georges County] and my husband went with her and they met at Judge Carr's office and -- 8 o'clock, the bulldozer was right there at the roof of the house and I had two friends from Baltimore who were both ministers -- C. D. Witherspoon and Sherrell Witherspoon -- Courtney Witherspoon. And they stood in front of the bulldozer. There's a picture of that in the paper. Eight o' one, Judge Carr called. I don't know if he called the Chief of Police or the Mayor, but he called. They were all gathered around waiting to see this demolition. They really had no authority to do it but he picked up the phone and called and said, "Cease, desist and get off the property." So the Chief of Police called me, "Ms. Grant, Ms. Grant! Did Judge Carr give you an injunction?" I said, "Yes, he did." So the injunction, of course, stands, but now that it's been made an historical house [in Harford County], it's there. In the meantime, we were struck by "Sandy" back in 2012 and we were in that hotel - the Marriott - for 14 months, that's a long time but it was nice. Someone came in in the middle of the night. And of course, you know Aberdeen has all these machines and whatever is needed for demolition and of course, they were using them to tear down homes. Someone came in in the middle of the night and totally gutted that house inside. Now it had been the house had been totally renovated by Quakers. They did that for free and the Mayor's wife, the Mayor at that time, his - I'm sorry - his mother - called me and said, "Janice, may I see your house?" And I said, "Certainly." She had something to do with the beautification of Aberdeen. So she came in and jumped up and down on the floors; she went upstairs; she went into all of the rooms. I think they had three bedrooms upstairs and a full bath. It had three
showers, a small bath downstairs, a full kitchen, full dining room, a living room and another bedroom [and an attic]. And she said there's nothing wrong with this house. So when Woody and I went to Ghana on a Missions trip we had it covered with siding and it looked really nice. But they had taken all the siding off except for the very top. I guess they couldn't reach that. John Langston was the one who began - we had hired him to renovate and give us a new porch. Well, he destroyed the porch and when I looked and saw what he had done - he stole a lot of stuff as well - we just fired him. But what had happened in the meantime, he had been working with the then Public Works director in Aberdeen. They had directed this and we were not aware that this was going on but I have two friends who are witnesses to what the house did look like because they had done work for us. They had gotten an architect to say that the house was stable and could be renovated. The house was built in 1931 which is not really that 'old, old', a little before I was born. I thank God for Jim [Chrismer] and I thank God for Judge Carr and of course, Braveboy. I called her Braveboy, Aisha Braveboy. Sounds like a Native American name, doesn't it? And we went to the office in Aberdeen [to meet with the town director and the town attorney, four of us]. This is very interesting because in the paper the town director said it's just a shell and it will collapse. So he said, [I asked,] "How do you know it's a shell and we don't?" So in our eyes, he gave something away. Later, let's see Braveboy had done the work she did, and she came from -- twice we met. I believe it was twice. Yes. Woody and my two friends, we had talked to the town director and we also talked to -- can't think of his name right now -- I'll think of it later. [Matthew Lapinsky] He gave us a certain amount of time to do this and do that. Knowing all the time what they were going to do and not giving us enough time to get it -- "Well, you didn't get it done; you have 5 days" and that kind of thing which was ridiculous. I mean who builds a house in 5 days? But nevertheless, Braveboy, the second time when we were with the town director and town attorney, they threw some pictures out at us and they showed chaos inside the house where it had been dismantled, some of it. And there were boards and things just lying all around. And lesha Braveboy said, "Where did you get those pictures?" No one answered, neither the attorney nor the town director. But I had already seen them in the attorney's office in Bel Air. And I asked him. I said, "Where did you get those pictures?" He said, "The lawyer for Aberdeen sent them to me." Well, I never indicated that I had seen them. Then on the way out Aisha, my husband, Woody; and another friend [Cornelius Scoff], the attorney asked me, the owner of the house, that they had totally dismantled and most of the inside was gutted, "Don't tell anyone you saw the pictures." Now someone has tried to destroy your house and you know it and you're not going to say anything about it? So that was that. And then of course, I think they probably -- we had a hearing. I had a friend to come with me and at the hearing, that's when they gave us a certain amount of time to do this and to do that and so forth. But I just have to say God is the one who used Judge Carr, and Jim [Chrismer]. I give him so much, so much credit. James Chrismer. I really want his name to be there at the lick. Everyone knows what he did and he really didn't know me. I was coming up the steps of the Historical Society to get some information and he said, "I know you." You ran for City Council in Aberdeen. Three times. And you also ran for Mayor. (Chuckles) I guess he, the historian, was keeping up with the news and what not, he recognized me from that. That's probably been two years or more ago since then. And he was constantly digging up information and following different guidelines and what not. He knew about my husband, Woody Grant, who was one of the Richmond Thirty-four which probably you haven't heard of. But he was a student at Virginia Union University. I didn't know him then. He and 34 others, of course, it was hundreds marched through the city of Richmond for two years. And they totally desegregated the city of Richmond -- the restaurants, department stores, everything. And they had a fifty year reunion and made a plaque with all their names and it's on the spot where a department store used to be. There's a plaque on the campus of Virginia Union with their names and there's some other store that indicates that this was where it occurred. Richmond had an entire week of celebration. And the [grand]daughter of the -- Thalhimers was the name of the department store. It took one year [two years] of marching to desegregate but they did. Now you know that was the center of the South during the Civil War, Richmond. (Chuckles) but nevertheless, he was in Army here at Aberdeen and I was teaching at Havre de Grace Consolidated which is now the Roye-Williams Elementary. I was introduced to him by a friend. There was a little place we used to go called Laico's ["social" spelled backwards] and he was there. There was really no place else for us to go. Everything was segregated in Aberdeen. Everything. Even the hospital [and the library]. There was one room in the hospital for people of color. And women who gave birth, even men were in that room on the first floor. They had "White Women" and "Colored Women" on the bathroom doors. We were, as kids, our school was right there -- the Havre de Grace Colored [High] School on Alliance and Stokes -- and my friend Vivian [Cole], my sister, Carol, and I would go over to the hospital. We didn't need to use the rest room but we would go in where it said "White Women". And the lady would say, "You're not supposed to be there. That says 'White Women', your rest room is over here" and we said, "We can't read." (Laughter) And they believed us! We were high school kids and we would just do things like that. Go in a store where you couldn't sit at the counter and order ice cream and then drop it and say, "Ooh! We dropped our ice cream." (Laughing) And go to the movie, go upstairs and sit upstairs which really was better. You could see much better. (Chuckles) Oh, just silly, silly things. Or you would have to go to the backdoor of the restaurants and get your food in a bag if you wanted it. And actually, when my brother and sister went to high school from Aberdeen -- there was no school for us in Aberdeen. There was a school called Mt. Calvary and I have a picture of that. I was there in first grade and my teacher Alma Dorsey Nelms. Excellent. She would walk -- she lived in Perryman -- and she would walk from the [Pennsylvania] train station up to Mt. Calvary, often in all types of weather. There were no substitutes, you know, things like that. Often people would give her rides but when she arrived she would have to make a fire in the pot-bellied stove and we students would go up to a stream and get the water. It's good memories, really.
DW Mmmhmm.
JG But she had one room, seventy eight students in seven grades and she taught them all. And when we left to go to [high] school we were pretty well versed. However, I say it's a joke. You had to be a moron not to learn -- to sit in a room for seven years (Chuckles) and hear the same thing over and over and over -- you had to learnt
DW Right.
JG So, later of course, I was only there one year at Mt. Calvary then D. W. Noble, who was a supervisor, came by and asked parents in Aberdeen if they would be willing to sign their children over to go to Perryman School. They needed more students. That was a big school -- two rooms! (Chuckles). So my mom signed for us to go and at first we had a bus but at times we would have to walk from Aberdeen to Perryman. Now remember there was a school right here in Aberdeen and we were not permitted to go to that school. But this is the interesting part. The first room had first, second, and third grade. The next room went from fourth to seventh grade because at that time they didn't have middle school. They called it junior high school. So in the school, Mr. Heirst, Chauncey Heirst was his name. He was a teacher and the Principal and he had the one book -- science book. We didn't have books and our parents had to buy the copy books or notebooks -- copy books that -- you may remember speckled, black and white speckled books. I do not know to this day how they managed with -- to do that for their children because things were scarce back in the '30's and '40's and what not, before the war. But the teacher would stand, Mr. Heirst would stand and read from the science book and we would write [what he read] and that would be our copy books or text books. And I had a huge knot on this [my right] finger from, you know, the writing from where the pencil, the force of the pencil, I guess. But we learned; we learned in spite of it. We did have some books. They were marked all over. Some didn't have backs on them and I guess, I don't know what their thinking could have been. I don't know. But you know what? In spite of it, we still managed. We finally -- I never got it but I went to the Havre de Grace Colored High School; graduated. It's still there. Dr. Hirsch bought it and his wife. That was my graduation school and I don't mind telling people that I graduated from Havre de Grace Colored High School. People think it was a consolidated school -- my first year teaching, I was at the Havre de Grace Consolidated School but we didn't even have a place to graduate in. We didn't even have enough rooms for school in the high school. We used the churches. St. Matthews was one and St. James, Green Street was another and when we graduated we had our baccalaureate at, I think, it was St. James, Greene Street. And we graduated from Union United Methodist Church on Old Post Road, 700 Old Post Road, which people call Swan Creek now. I had 21 people in my graduating class. There were thirteen boys and eight girls.
DW Now I've seen the programs and you actually had two graduations? There was one at the local and there was like one for the county. Is that true?
JG Yes.
DW Ok, I remember that from a gentleman named Bill Rice.
JG Yes, oh, yes.
DW That lived in the Forest Hill area -
JO Yes, I know him.
DW The Federal Hill area.
JO I didn't bring the books and I regret that I didn't. I didn't think about it. The books that are written by Patrick Spicer ...
DW Oh, yea, mmm hmm.
JO That have quite a bit of history in them.
DW Yea, he did the desegregation.
JO Yes, he did. He said he didn't even know anything about it because when he came along things were different. But after I graduated -- the interesting thing is I went to a segregated college. There weren't many. We had Morgan State; Coppin; Maryland -- we called it Princess Anne on the Eastern Shore, it's now Maryland State at Princess Anne; and Bowie. They called it Maryland State Teachers College. You could either be an elementary teacher or a junior high school teacher. Bowie, now Bowie State University. But when I graduated, it was the same thing. Our teachers worked so hard because they knew what we had to face. They were excellent, excellent.
DW So when you were actually going to school, I mean in retrospect you know that 1896 Supreme Court ruling that said "separate but equal" -- yes, they were separate but certainly not equal. In retrospect you know that but at the time you were actually going to school, did you know that your books weren't as good?
JO We knew that but there was nothing we could do about that. We knew -- well, it was obvious -- I have family in Baltimore and my mom's home was Pennsylvania -- Philly -- but she went to school. And of course, my cousins all had nice books and things like that [in Baltimore] which we didn't have so we knew the difference. There was no question about that. But there was nothing that we could basically do about it. My dad started the first garbage collection in Aberdeen. [Mr. Vandella Williams, Dr. Williams' father, also started a garbage collection business before my dad.] There wasn't one and when Aberdeen finally got theirs, they put someone over him [my dad] and let him work under them. And he couldn't take that. He left and went to New York with his family. That's his home. I believe the garbage collection was about $1.25 a month back then. Can you imagine that? (Chuckles) At college, we graduated but we still could not go to a college to get a Master's or a Doctorate in Maryland. It was not to be permitted. But Maryland would pay for us to go to any school in the United States we wanted to go to. They would pay our tuition. They would give us a stipend. And it just sounds so ridiculous to pay that but as a result we all got Master degrees, we got doctorates that the state paid for. When desegregation came they realized that the teachers [of color were far better educated] and this is in the State Department of Education, my husband went there, and he saw this report. He and George Daniel Lisby worked there and Dr. Percy Williams. It indicated that the best trained and skilled teachers were the teachers [of color] - they called us Negroes then or colored and so they stopped paying and when I knew that I couldn't go to [schools of higher education in the state of Maryland] -- I always wanted a Master's degree, always -- so I looked on the map -- worked the first summer out teaching and I looked on the map and I said, "Where can I go to school and still be in the United States and get a Master's?" And it was California! (Laughter) So I chose UCLA and that's where I got my first Master's. And then, of course, they only paid for the -- well, they were to pay but I never did get my money for that year but I borrowed money from the bank to continue to complete and then, of course, after that Mrs. Juanita Jackson Mitchell. The foremost attorney for the NAACP who herself was the first woman of color to graduate from the University of Maryland Law School, and I think she had three children at that time.
And her mother, Dr. Lilly May Carroll Jackson, there's an [elementary] school in Baltimore named for her now. Her name was Carol. She brought the NAACP to Baltimore. And then she got my cousin, Walter Banks, to [establish the NAACP in Harford County] -- they had had an NAACP here in Hat-ford County but it lapsed during the war [WWII] -- and she knew that Walter was a fighter. She knew my mother was. And so he revived the NAACP and they used to go down the roads -- dark roads! -- those were days when they lynched people. I don't know if you're aware of that but there was a lynching tree in Magnolia and there was a lynching tree in Bel Air where the mall is now. And I remember in my lifetime -- people may not admit it -- but there were five men of color who were lynched there in Magnolia because they were accused of raping a white woman. And then later she confessed [it was a lie]. And they didn't do anything to her but just ran her out of town. But they were dead. Just like the Martinsville Seven that happened. My husband remembers that in his lifetime. But we started with (chuckles) going to the restaurants we would sit in. When I became a teacher, I had two close friends both of them were in my
wedding. I wasn't married then either. Rose Weems and Sylvia Lowery. She's now Sylvia Greene. Every day after school we would leave and we would go and sit-in in some restaurant. They had been from Morgan State University. They would do sit-ins in Baltimore and I would go to Baltimore to do them also. I was arrested, I think, twice in Maryland. Once at Joppatowne [also at Gwynn Oak Park] because I actually led the civil rights movement in Harford County before I knew my husband, Naturally, you get the leader you know. [William Kunstler was our pro bono attorney]. They thought that would stop them but it didn't. The parents knew me. I grew up with them; [went to school with with them] taught some of their children and they were gracious enough to let their children march with us. [They trusted us.] We marched in Aberdeen, Havre de Grace, Joppatowne, and Edgewood. And what were we marching for? For open housing, schools, equality, for teachers of color to be hired, promoted, to be put in central office, to . . . [be treated as equals].
DW What year was that?
JG We started in 1959. In 1958, I was doing this on my own, and in 1959 [1960] Rose and Sylvia joined me because they were younger and they came later as teachers. And we continued this up until - the incident occurred and that's recorded. An African diplomat was coming to Washington, D. C, to talk to the President and on the way to Washington he stopped on Rte. 40. The place is still there. I'm trying to recall the name of it. But they refused to give him a drink of water [for his son]. And, he, you know, they had worn these -- like I wear when I minister at the jail, the little uh .... what do you call them? They hang around your neck with your picture on it and tells who you are, And it said he was an African Diplomat. [Reported in Life Magazine]
DW Okay.
JO So on the front page of Life Magazine they'd taken a picture of the lady who had refused him. And she said, "How did I know he was an African diplomat? He looked just like any ordinary nigger to me." (Laughter) So, anyway as a result of that, he went to Washington, D. C., and highly indignant. The President of the United States notified Aberdeen Proving Ground, the general who was in charge. The general who was in charge called us to a meeting. When I say "us" - teachers. I went to George Lisby who later became a member of the Board of Education. Christine Tolbert and there were a few others and I can't recall their names. So Mr. Roye, Leoni Roye, was our principal at the Consolidated School [as well as Havre de Grace Colored High School] and he couldn't figure out what was going on. Now this was the second meeting that the general had had and he talked to us about our situation and "no" we can't go to the restaurants and eat and "no" we can't live where we want to. See, teachers who came here would have a room in someone's house. Even the principal had a room in someone's house! So the general, I don't know his name, but he made Aberdeen totally off limits to all military personnel. And what did that mean? It meant the revenue, you know, the restaurants and things like that, they would lose money. And I picked up the telephone and I called, I believe, I don't remember the name of the place now, [The Red ? A gasoline station is there now] I should have thought about these things before; nevertheless, I called and pretended that I was European and I called myself having an accent. And I asked why they were treating American citizens this way. In Europe - I had been to Europe, in Europe they can go to this place, this place and this place. And he called the restauranteurs all together and they had a meeting and they decided -- well, actually the pressure of not having people -- being off limits, they were losing money. So they decided to open the restaurants and what not. Then they called me, knowing at that time I was leading the group. "Well, where are all the colored people?" I said, "Well, they just want to know they have the privilege." There was only one place at that time we could eat in and it was called the Afro Restaurant on Route 40, up above Aberdeen slightly. Then it became Afro Rooms. Mrs. Margaret Dorsey was the person who owned that and she and her sister and I think there was another lady, they owned 16 acres up there in Mount Calvary. They took in a lot of men - veterans -- from Perry Point, you know, those that didn't have families and what not. But that restaurant wasn't segregated. Anyone could eat in our restaurants, you know? We didn't segregate. But after -- some of the things were comical -- in Joppatowne [and Edgewood] we would go to the houses and say, "Do you mind having colored people living next to you." This was before "black" became popular. When we were kids, if someone called you black you were offended. (Chuckles) But the NAACP softened the blow, had a picture of a beautiful baby and under it said "Black is beautiful." And I had an aunt, my mother's sister, who was a beautiful, beautiful brown, dark skin. Oh! She was beautiful. Her name was Ethel. Aunt Ethel. And she said to me, "Jenny, I used to be ashamed of my color but when the NAACP said black is beautiful, I did this. I said, "Aunt Ethel, I always thought you were beautiful." We never thought about a color. We weren't brought up that way. I had a great grandfather who died in the same house up here [I was born in on Edmund Street]. James East was his name. People would come to the house and say to my mother, "Margaret, who's that white man in your house?" She said, "That's not a white man. That's my grandfather." And he would do this. [Place their arm next to his and say,] "Well, he's as white as I am." Well.. .(Chuckles) That's not surprising. You know, there are many at that time and many still, they called it passing? He had two daughters, well, he had more than that, but two daughters that went to New York. They could have passed for white but they didn't. Aunt Daisy and Aunt Callie. So, anyway, people would look and they would come and visit us. Aunt Daisy had red hair, kind of a beautiful red hair. Aunt Callie had what we call "coal black" hair. But (chuckles) finally, marching back and forth in Joppatowne and this place, here comes the police with a paddy wagon and they put me in the paddy wagon (chuckles). One of my friends, Walter Banks, we called him "Banky," his wife, Maudeline, she helped him. They started the first NAACP picnics in their backyard to raise funds. She said, "Janice, I saw you getting in the paddy wagon!" I was arrested but not for long.
Then I was arrested again at Gwynn Oak Park when there were lots of us who would demonstrate. But what we would do was one white person and one black person would go together because we knew we'd be arrested. And so I was arrested there in Baltimore County and not for long. I got out and we were interviewed by -- I don't even remember what stations -- I think it was Channel 2. And I really am sorry I didn't get the names of all these people because they should be remembered and they should be noted. Can you recall any of the names of the people who worked for Channel 2. He was from Mississippi and he laughed and he said, "I'm from Mississippi." And he was accustomed to that. He died of cancer but he was a great guy.
DW Hmm.
JG Probably one of the reasons I don't have all this together is because I was trying to get things together to go to a Benin City, Nigeria as well. I have a meeting up there today [New Castle, Delaware].
DW Let me back you up to your -- what's your earliest memory here in Aberdeen?
JG I remember, well, oh gosh, it goes back to a, this isn't a very good one, but my grandmother was married to a barber. His name was Joseph Lawson and he had a barber shop where men would come and they would shoot what they called craps and drink. He was a bootlegger. [Had been in prison in Virginia for murder. Once he picked Ben Ray up and threw him out of the yard. Ben Ray stopped at the gate to ask permission to enter.]
DW Mmm.
JO And a lady came -- a soldier had come and spent all of his pay gambling and she came up to the gate, called him out and she killed him. Stabbed him to death.
DW Oooh, wow!
JO And that was a horrible, horrible thing to remember. But I can recall us walking to Mount Calvary, going to the spring.
DW That was also called Bush Chapel.
JO [Correct,] Bush Chapel.
DW Yea, ok.
JO And actually it still is. I have a picture of that school.
DW I do, too. (Laughter)
JO And then I recall the bus but also, often when we would walk there would be other girls, you know, they called them white and [my] son calls them "beige." One girl said to us -- Vivian, Carol and I -- we were also friends together. Vivian Cole. They've both passed away. They're with the Lord now. One girl said to us, "I'm from the South and down there niggers get off the streets for us! They actually cross over to the other side. They don't even walk on the same street we walk on." We didn't say a word. We just kept right on walking while she was cursing us and talking about niggers here and niggers there. (Chuckling) We got across the B & O Railroad tracks and right where the traffic light is [now] for Paradise Road, there was a massive tree. And we got those girls -- it's not a pleasant thing -- but we got those girls against that tree and we (Chuckles) [beat them badly, we drew blood]. And a man came along, several men who knew who we were and they had a pickup truck. They said, "You children get in this truck, I'm taking you home," because they knew what could happen to us. But we never thought about that. There were times, as I said we would deliberately go to places and order things and just drop it and do things like that. I cannot really remember too many pleasant memories except we had this huge yard and my father -- what a personality he had -- everyone like him and he was always happy. The minute the neighborhood would get together and come to our yard, you know, after the gardens and all and they would play baseball. That was their fun recreation and the women would cook for them. And then my dad, I don't know how he learned, well, he grew up in North Carolina; well, he was there for nine years before they moved to New York. He was the one everyone would come to to slaughter pigs. And that was a big day when they slaughtered the pigs and we had to clean what they call chitterlings' the Kentucky oysters or the inside and it was terrible. You used big tubs, squeezing them and turning them out.
Then, of course, the ladies would meet. They called it Ladies Aid and they would come to different homes and have tea and cookies. They would read the Bible and pray and pray for this city, pray for this nation. And I can recall seeing the buses pass us. We would have to wait in Aberdeen then they moved us, a certain spot in Aberdeen, for the bus. Then we waited on Route 40 [to go to school in Perryman]. [While waiting for the bus] for entertainment we would name for all the cars from different states. You know Aberdeen Proving Ground was pretty big Military base. [It began in 19]17. It started the same time the land was bought. We'd see how many of us could [name] the black cars and the green cars. Things like that. Just for entertainment. I guess really there weren't that many, except family things. We'd have family gatherings. Everyone gathered in that house up there [at 411 Edmund St.] for grandmother. Family reunions we'd always have them. We still have them. We have them today, right over here on this property. We used to have three or four but now we have one once a year. There really weren't that many nice things that happened because right where my house started, if you go on Edmund Street you can still see the division. The paved road stopped -- we were the first black family -- and it stopped right where our property began. It was all dirt roads and it was a mound like a hill and they would call us the niggers on the hill. (Chuckles) And we didn't have running water. We had an outhouse. My father built that. We had a well. You know, you had the rope and you would drop it down. Then my father, he taught himself to be a carpenter and he was very much wanted. He taught himself to be a, to cook and to bake and the restaurants wanted him. He taught himself to really be a mechanic. I said if he ever had the opportunity to be educated, what he could have done. But he finally, somehow, he made one these round type -- you've seen pictures of the wells that you wind up? [To raise and lower the bucket with a rope.]
DW Oh, ok.
JO So he made one of those. In fact, I have one in my yard. (Chuckles) A wishing well. And on the roller he had the rope, of course, and then you'd roll it down and then you'd roll the water back up. It was easier. Then of course, later we got a pump. And then my grandmother, of course, she had a pump as well. And I grew up like that. It wasn't until I was in the seventh grade that we got running water, a restroom and what not in the house [built by my stepfather, Japeth Johns]. But we existed; we were happy. Well, sometimes we were hungry but not starving. My dad worked on the railroad in addition and we would walk the railroad tracks with our buckets and pick blackberries; bring them home - the ones we didn't eat on the way! (Laughter) And my mother would make blackberry dumplings and that would be our dinner. But we also didn't have money for a turkey. We had some pigs so my mom and dad roasted a pig for Christmas dinner. Christmas was his birthday. They had a little apple in the pig's mouth. We were eating high on the hog! (Laughter) We did have some good times together. [We sang Christmas Carols at Christmas on the streets and at the Havre de Grace Hospital. Mrs. Bernie Williams led our choir.] We believed in education. You know that was a must. My grandmother . . . [My mother and stepfather got their GEDs through adult education with our fine teachers at Havre de Grace Consolidated.]
DW Go ahead.
JG My grandmother and her sister, Aunt Georgianna, went to school in Chester, PA. And I believe they went to the seventh grade and I didn't know that. My grandmother was blind. She lost her sight -- they lived in Philadelphia. They had moved to [Chester then to] Philadelphia from Aberdeen and had bought this land and built the house as a summer home. They did very well. They had a restaurant on South Street. When my Grandmother Mary East lost her sight, she lost her sight by ice-skating. She fell on the ice, cut her eye, went to the hospital and they injected her with an infected needle. I don't think it was on purpose. They didn't sanitize at that time. So they closed the restaurant, sold it and moved to Aberdeen [to live at 411 Edmund St.].
The house was built in '31 as I said, but my great grandmother, I think she passed suddenly [also in 1931]. I believe she had a heart attack. So she didn't get a chance to really live in the house very long but my grandmother did. I had a cousin, Melvin Reed, who was a doctor in the Navy but at that time he was a friend of mine but really he was like a brother. My Aunt Elizabeth [East Ogburn] sent him to live with my grandmother. He was her eyes. I'd go over and help him with the dishes and what not. So, those are some pleasant memories. [I had friends the Coles, the Christys and also played with non-blacks who lived nearby.] We enjoyed each other. I had a friend, Vivian Cole Robinson. She lived down at the end of Edmund Street. Her morn, we called her Miss Lily, Miss Lily Cole. And when it would rain, there were dips in the ground and we would put on swimming suits and we'd swim on the lawn.
DW (Chuckles)
JG We would plait grass. And at that time in Aberdeen, it would flood also because history says the Chesapeake Bay, I believe it was, or the Susquehanna, would come all the way up [to Rt. 40]. And we would go out in Aberdeen and swim on Route 40! It was that much water.
Later, after high school [while I was in high school], a gentleman came named Montgomery Meigs Green. He came to the school and asked the principal if there was a girl who could come and live with him, his wife was pregnant. My principal, Mr. Roye, had mentioned my sister, Carol. My mother said no, she was too young. So I was the one who went to live with them. And it was on Sion Hill in Havre de Grace. It was mansion that was built before the United States actually became the United States because they thought Havre de Grace was going to become the Capitol, as you know. So every brick at that house and the glass [windows] came from England because there were not manufacturing places here at that time. That house, Sion Hill, went down through the family and it had 23 rooms, and of course bathrooms. I lived there for seven years. Mrs. Green, her name was Laurel Ann Watts Green from Camel, Indiana. She'd been a Gray Lady in the Navy during the war and she met Mr. Green. I think he was a - do they have lieutenants in the Navy? I can't remember. [He was from Winchester, Virginia.]
DW Mmmhmm.
JIG Even though we had lots of Navy people in our family, my brother, cousins, uncles. They treated me well. They never made any difference. Whatever they ate, I ate. And I was the cook at first and then later I helped with the children. Then when I finished college, and they helped me a lot with that. She'd been a teacher in Indiana. They called me the "governess" (laughter). And when they went on trips, I went on trips. Went to Vermont and I saw the Green Mountains and oh, they were beautiful. It looked as though every day they looked different from the sunlight on them. Burlington, Vermont, is where they had a summer home as well. So I learned to love to travel because my Aunt Jo did a lot of traveling also which is unusual back in the day for black people to do a lot of traveling but she kind of "birthed" that into me. And I got that instinct and when I met my husband in March of 1963 and we were married in June of 1963. [He was in the Army and stationed in Aberdeen.]
DW Wow! (Chuckles)
JG And we've been married for 53 years. When I said my vows I meant them.
DW (Laughter)
JG For better or worse till death d[o us part].... but he's a good husband. He's really a good man. He got out of the military. We went to Switzerland on our honeymoon. I have met Marguerite Berger who the Greens brought back with them from Switzerland as the governess. We became great friends. There was no problem with color with the Europeans. And one day Marguerite said to me, "Where do you keep it?" I said, "Keep what?" She said, "Your tail." (Laughter) I said, "I don't have a tail." She said we were told that all the people, I guess she said "negroes", had tails. I said, "No, we don't." (Laughter) And she said when we went over we stayed with her part of the time because we visited other countries, Italy and we went to Rome and what not [Holland, France and Germany]. But we went to a restaurant with her. They lived in Neuhausen. We went to a restaurant with her in Schaffhausen and some people said, "It's getting very cloudy in here." [Meaning we were dark.](Laughter) They were American. We stopped in Zurich and my husband was a very handsome young man and a couple from Chicago -- I forgot what the place is called -- but they were wealthy. And they came up and asked, "Are you Harry Belafonte?" (Laughter)
JG And we laughed! I said, "Well we all look alike but no. (Laughter) But they didn't mistake me for Lena Home. (Laughter) But I believe it was in Neuhausen Marguerite took us to the Rhine [River] Falls. That is something everyone should see. It is so beautiful. The falls, like we have Niagara, they just come down in cascades. Just one right over the other and criss cross. That is so beautiful. We didn't have a movie camera then. We'll have to go back and take it one day but that was our first trip overseas.
Later, after he was discharged we found President Kennedy's son that was born, we found out about that, who died before John John. They were talking about it and we were in London. We'd been in London for a fortnight. Then we heard about the march on Washington and we said, oh, we're going to miss that. So they told everyone to go to the embassy and sign up in Paris. So we went to the embassy and signed up as Americans. Then we decided we're going to that march. So we were able to get a flight out, you know the International Date Line, you cross one day and it's the next day. So we got back that day [the next day was the march] and my husband was still in the Army but he drove me and my twin brothers, Timothy and Thomas Morehead, to the march on Washington. That was something -- something I'll never forget. The buses, hundreds and hundreds of buses just going down Route 40, and of course, 195, it was called the Northeast, I think, Expressway. You know, later named for President Kennedy after his assassination. It was just, I just, I don't know. It was one of the most exciting things in my life. And another thing, of course, when I got saved. Born again. And the other thing was when I met Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian Emperor. That was, oh! I'll have to tell more about that because that is significant. We went to the march on Washington, we got, of course, in the crowd. I helped my brothers who were much younger than myself. We worked our way all the way up and got seats and sat there and heard the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King - I Have a Dream and Mahalia Jackson singing that song. Oh! My goodness! It was just something -- I can still see it in my mind. But you just … I can't explain it. What it was like because they had said ... you know they shut down everything. People left Washington. "Oh, those black people are going to destroy Washington" and it was very peaceful, a peaceful day. I never met a person I didn't like Will Rogers said. How can you meet someone and not like them? You don't even know them. But I also don't meet strangers. We just started conversations up and there were plenty of people that we call white that were part of that. I've never had any animosity because we weren't reared that way! Any way we spent the day there and somebody gave us a ride back on one of the buses, my two brothers and myself. I wanted to go back to Woody and I. Woody taught school in Baltimore County for two years, then he was accepted at Meharry Medical College, so we moved to Nashville. He graduated and taught there for two years in a program that the government sponsored to find ways to prevent heart attacks. In the meantime, we joined the NAACP in that branch. We were already members, life members (in Harford County]. He became the president and I became the secretary. There were no black people at the TV station up front, you know, where you could see them and they came up for licensing. So I wrote a letter, Woody signed it and then his friend, I'll think of his name because he should be recognized. [His name was Daniel Lane] Hazel Land was the field director [for the National NAACP]. It said: To the FCC - Do not give them a license to continue their TV station until they hire a person, a colored person. (I guess we still call them that.) [1968] And that person was a student at Tennessee A & I, they called it at that time. It is now Tennessee State. I believe she was reading the weather or something like that but they hired her to be up front and that was Oprah Winfrey.
DW Hmmm.
JO (Laughter) Her first job! Then of course, later she came here to Baltimore and Richard Scher and they worked together. In the meantime, we had gone to the Garbage Man's March in Memphis, and of course, the second garbage meant, you know, there was confusion there and they had to take Dr. King away. So the second march with the garbage men, "I am a Man," were the signs. We were preparing to go. We didn't have children then. Woody was at the [NAACP] office planning. We were going to have a caravan of cars to go down and join the march. I was resting in the living room and my mother-in-law called from Martinsville, Virginia. And she said, "Are you all right?" and I said, "Yea, we're fine." She said, "Well, I wondered because I know you all are always into something."
DW (Chuckles)
JO I said, "Well, how are things there?" She said, "Well, I'm calling because Dr. King got shot." I said, "No, if he'd been shot, we would know because we're getting ready to go down to the march again." I said, "Wait, let me turn the TV on." It was all over the television. Mrs. King, they had told her before she arrived that he was dead and oh! The people began. Now they knew our cars. We had a Volkswagen square back and a Karmann Ghia. They overturned cars. They didn't touch our car because they knew we were the NAACP people. NAACP. So, I got a sign and I made it say "Jim Crow may be dead but Jim Crow Jr. is still very much alive!" We went to a mortuary and got a small, white, child's coffin and put that on it, and four of us carried that coffin through the streets of Nashville and demanded that they lower the flags. And they did. I told my principal, "I won't be at school today." And he said, "I understand, Janice" and he cried. He was such a good man. We were beaten up by the police and we were arrested. (Laughter) But the NAACP got us out. And this is kind of silly but I'd just bought a brand new pair of loafers and I lost one of my new loafers. And when we went to Africa, the attorney, I don't remember his name and I'm sorry, but he sued the police. He asked us if we wanted to do it and we said, 'Well, all right.' At that time, it was a $1,000 he sued for which was a lot of money back in -- it was 1971 at that time. We were already in Africa because they had sent -- Bob Butts came around and asked if anyone wanted to join the Peace Corps. Well, I had already joined and I was assigned to Thailand but I was single. And then my husband wanted to go to Africa. He wanted -- they were offering Masters Degrees. So he wanted a Masters Degree, he had his B.S. Well, I already had one [from UCLA] but I said ok. So we decided that we would join the Peace Corps and we did. By that time we had adopted a son and he was two and half years old when we went to Liberia, West Africa.
DW Hmmm.
JG We were a country in the interior, 125 miles from the capitol city [Monrovia] which was named for our President James Monroe because you know it was settled in 1822 on an island called Providence and it was called Perseverance, later called Providence [in 1822]. It's a museum now. The people who landed there were people who came from, I think it was 23 states [of the US]. The fathers -- now all of these and I've forgotten the name -- Octoroon, or something like that, but they were children of slave masters and they didn't want their children to be slaves so they put them on a ship called the Good Ship Elizabeth right in the harbor place down here. {they were from] twenty-three states and they sailed to Liberia and they called it Liberia because it means the "love of liberty brought us here". And then later they moved from the island to the mainland. Unfortunately, they became almost what had happened here. The uh, what did we call them? The native people, but it was another name for that. They called themselves Americo-Liberians and sort of ruled over the people who were born there. Then of course, you know, later they killed most of the Americo-Liberians. Some of them were Christians and said that there was no fear. They couldn't understand why they didn't have fear because when you're a Christian you know where you're going. You know you're going to be with the Lord so you don't have the fear of death. I believe that He gives you peace somehow but they tied them to posts right there on the Atlantic Ocean and shot them. They had that in Life Magazine. I saw that later when I was visiting in Martinsville, Virginia.
But the president, William Tubman, he was president for life in Liberia. He went to Europe and was operated on and died. So naturally they had a State funeral. Many of the leaders, African leaders, came. Some of them were sent from the United States and some of the other European countries were represented. We were -- school was closed -- so we came from up country down to Monrovia. We had our son, Ben, with us. He had turned three by that time. And there was Haile Selassie! That was -- oh, that was marvelous to see. He was the only Emperor in Africa - Ethiopia. And he stood like this. His hands stretched like this which represented Ethiopia. Oh, he was such a stately man. He was kingly looking. He had bronze skin and I don't know if he had a beard or not, I had a picture of him. We said we wanted to have to take a picture and it's fortunate that we did because later he was assassinated. As you know, the Italians had taken over Ethiopia during the war and so he was on his knees praying and they had him get in the bed and they smothered him with a pillow.
The missionaries got all of the children out so there's still children living. You know the Bible says that God chose David but there would always be a member of his family on the throne. The women of his family were imprisoned but were released some years later. The Emperor, Haile Selassie, of Ethiopia traced his heritage right back to King David and no one denied that because they knew the lineage went straight back. King David -- what was the other king's name? -- Anyway, that is what King David looked like -- copper skin. He wasn't a tall man. He was about my height. He just, he was like this. Ah, that was one of the most important times in my life -- to have met the Emperor Haile Selassie, in person! There were many, many other leaders that we met.
The interesting thing is we were Peace Corps volunteers and you could actually go to like the White House, you could go to the king's palace and meet with him. We went to the daughter's wedding. We were Americans so I guess maybe that made us special. I don't know. People would ask us to come to their churches. They said big, big people like you we know. We were able to learn the language. You had to learn the [main] language of your village and it was called Kpelle. It was Pelly because it really started with a "K" and was (she makes a popping sound with her mouth). You made like a click sound and said [demonstrates how to make the sound of the word]. They do that in a country in South Africa as well. But the English couldn't say [again makes the Pelly sounds] and they could say [single popping sound] Pelly. So they left the "K" off and just called it Pelly. So we learned that and our son, as I said was two and a half [when we arrived]. We thought he couldn't really talk but he was speaking four languages of the children around him [Kpelle, Mano, Bassa and French]. My neighbor, Richard Flomo, was an attorney and Richard Flomo could talk to us in English; someone else would come up and he would speak to them in Bassa, and then someone else would come up and he would speak to them in Mano and then someone else would come up and he could speak French!
DW (Chuckles)
JG I mean the children, little kids, could speak languages and people call them dialects. They were languages. Liberia is about the size of Illinois and they had 23 languages. The school we went to was called -- later we went to Gboveh High and I taught Social Studies, English and what do you call it? -- [Woody taught] Physics. Calculus and several other things. Then when we went to Monrovia, we were at St. Theresa's Convent and that was an all-girls school. So we started a collegiate type program on the TV. I forget what they called it here but it's like "It's Academic" and our girls were champions. The thing about the kids there, all the youngsters, ah ... I wish our students could get it
they were so thirsty for knowledge.
DW Mmmhmm.
JG I never had a problem out of a student. Never. Not one. When we would come into the room, the classroom, this would be the tenth grade room, eleventh and twelfth. The teacher would move from room to room and when you came in, the students would stand up out of respect for the teacher. And they, the lowest IQ I had in the three years or actually four years but three years there was 91%.
DW Mmm.
JG I took them to the Supreme Court and they still wore the wigs like the British did and the kids, we walked there and then we went back the next day so they could see how the courts were [operated] … just experiences that they had not had. I tried to get a group together to bring to the United States, for them to go, but we weren't able to raise enough money. I probably should have written and asked if people would give us funds, you know. But that was quite an experience. The homes -- some of those people had the most gorgeous homes. One lady, Dr. Brown, who was my dentist, she'd been educated here [in the US]. She had a massive house and in the center of it, she had a -- I can't think of what you call it -- but in the middle of it, glass open at the top, she had like a botanical garden.
DW Atrium.
JG Right. In the middle of her home. And then they had other homes. They had some that were like grass huts that even though it was grass because they would make the roof out of palm leaves because the water would just go right off of that [the leaves]. But the house was gorgeous.
One day, I asked the girls to get permission slips from their parents to -- we were going somewhere I was taking them. So the girl said, "Well, I should bring it back tomorrow." She said, "Well, I can't. My mother went -- is not home." I said, 'Well, when she comes home." She said but my mom went shopping. I said, "Well, when she comes back from shopping." She said, "She won't be back for four days." I said, "Where did she go?" She said, "She went to Rome and Paris shopping." (Chuckles) I mean, just things like that.
We lived across, we lived on United Nations Drive, 1-1-1, right across the street from the Peace Corps office and the BMW - where they sold BMWs and Mercedes. And the Mercedes was a regular car for people there. (Laughter) Because the distance between, I think it was Italy and North Africa, was 8 miles. If you could swim you could probably swim that. But it was so interesting because of the things that people told you and I dressed like the people dressed. Just like this. People call it a turban or a wrap. We call it a "gele," [pronounces gaylay] but you could tell what country people were from by the way they tied their geles or head ties. Some would be done like this and what not. We were fortunate enough to go to oh, many, many nations there to visit … but anyway when we came back, Dr. Williams, Dr. Percy Williams, and his wife came to Liberia and he wanted to study the education[al system]. You know Monrovia is a sister city to Baltimore and he came to study the education. He knew we were there so he asked my mother and she told him to go to the Peace Corp's office. Well, we were right across the street, so they came over. We entertained them for several days. They didn't know it but they ate some snails (laughter) and Peace Corps loaned Woody a Mercedes truck and he took Dr. Williams up country to the different places of Gbarnga, and just -- Maryland County and things like that. Lots of places were named for places here [in Maryland] -- Randallstown, we went to church in Randallstown. And so when -- we came back in February -- and do you know Dr. Williams saved a job for my husband for three months. And when Woody came back, in three days later he had a job at the State Department of Education and he was made Chief of Equity, Assurance and Compliance and he stayed for 38 years and worked there. He made lots of friends, lots of good people. In the beginning I think he had something like about 20 employees and went down to 12 because they reduced it. But he stayed there and I do have to tell you. I filed a suit against Harford County to desegregate the schools. Mrs. Juanita Jackson Mitchell was the attorney,
DW What year?
JG 19 -- umm, I wasn't married.
DW Was this before Brown vs. The Board of Education or after?
JG It was after. It was probably 1960. It was 1960. 1960. And then I was told by my principal that I had to drop that suit. Dr. Willis, Charles W. Willis told my principal to do that. I guess they thought I was frightened but I was always bold because of my mom, her history and my dad. We just never learned to cower down. We weren't disrespectful, we weren't rude; we always had to call people Mr. or Mrs. But we always knew who we were and we always knew that we were not better than anyone but we were as good. I said, "Mr. Roye, that's not going to happen." He said, "Well, we will blackball you from state to state." You'll never get another job teaching. I said, "That's fine." I washed dishes, took care of children. It was an honest living. So because he said that, I had a cousin [Nathalian East Roberts] that worked at Coppin State. She was a librarian. She said, "Janice, come down. I'll get you an application and she did. Coppin wanted to hire me as a professor in their college. Then I went to Aigburth Manor in Baltimore County and I was hired both times in the same day to work in Essex. They said you would be the only colored person there.
But I just did that to show them I could get a job. So we went through. It was funny.
Then my husband and I filed a suit. Now all of these necessarily reached it was in Federal court but because they would settle, they all were not listed. I have a picture that was in the AFRO of my husband and I filing that suit. When he got out of the military, Harford County wouldn't hire him because of our civil rights activity. John Carroll offered him a job here and he went to Baltimore County. They [Baltimore County] offered to pay him to go to school to be a counselor because he got along so well with the young people. Now there were only two people of color at that school, Holabird, in Dundalk. As I said he was in the Reserves because he had been in the Army and had gotten out. I think eleven [five] years he spent. His commander said they were getting ready to send his unit not to Viet Nam but I forget what war was going on then, it might have been Viet Nam. And so, he said, if I were you, you're a college boy. He didn't mean any harm. He said, "If I were you, I'd go to school and take a course. They won't send you if you're in school." So he went straight to Johns Hopkins and took a course at Johns Hopkins. He was successful but that was after he learned that when we left here, he learned he was accepted at Meharry [Medical College]. And then of course, he resigned. I think it was three years he was at Holabird. And then I resigned and my friends said, "I know they're glad you're gone." But I had been, I don't know what you would call it, but because [my family and] I was in actually five suits in all and we have that in the book. We were on one case called the Christmas case. And Mrs. Mitchell wanted teachers, so Woody and I were also plaintiffs for that. And my mother filed a suit for her sons, [twins] Timmy and Tommy, to go to Aberdeen High School. Remember the Pettit case. That was the first. And then Ernestine Slade had one for her daughter, Roslyn. Then my sister filed a case against the Board for her two sons, Christopher Brown and Michael Brown. Both are military veterans now. But the entire time I was in this county, that sat [sent] the supervisor down, this is Violet Davis Merryman, she supervised me every day for thirty days [in an effort to wear me down or frighten me.]. You were only supposed to be supervised for 20 minutes so many days out of the year and we had evaluations that I kept in my file cabinet. They were all good. They had been taken out and changed. The idea was to make me look like a second class teacher so that I would get lower pay or to intimidate me to quit. And then one day she said to me, "You don't mind people watching you, do you?" I said, "No, I know what I'm doing." My teachers had taught me well at Bowie. And I said, "I just treat you like a piece of furniture. You're here. I know what I have to do and we had huge classes then because we were still segregated. In my first class I had 44 students in the third grade and the next year I had 48 in grades three and four [combined]. It was great. You learned to have different groups and direct the teachers. Some who had been my teachers helped you. Then did whatever they could to help you along. Later, they [supervisors and principals] did everything that they possibly could do to try to make me quit. Again, I left [when Woody was accepted at Meharry Medical]; taught in Tennessee for four years; we went to Texas Southern [University] -- Peace Corps paid for that. We got another Master's Degree. I got one in secondary education and Woody in Science and Biology. Then we went to the [African] continent and attended University of Liberia and I got a Masters in African History and Geography and about the people and the culture. And don't you know I came back after teaching there, four years [in high school] and I had substituted at Texas Southern [University] in English while a student, and we came back to the United States, back to Maryland, Woody was working at the State Department as I said. I went up to the Board of Education and Mr. C. Clark Jones was the Director of Personnel and I had searched and there were 78 jobs in elementary, middle and high and I qualified for all of them. And do you know he told me there were no jobs and there wouldn't be any for two years. I left. This is February and then I, somebody offered me a job at the YMCA but I didn't take that and I applied for unemployment. Well, August I was called to come up and sign a contract. So I went up and signed a contract. In the meantime, I said, "You know, I've never seen my certificate." (Teaching certificate.) He said, "Oh, I'll show it to you." So he had the secretary go in and pull it out. On my certificate in a brown arch, it said, "Valid to teach in colored schools only."
DW Hmm.
JG And so I went to a meeting in Baltimore with the Maryland Interracial Commission [under Rev. Dr. Douglass B. Sands]. I had worked with them. And it was Parren Mitchell. Parren Mitchell came after [Rev. Dr. Douglass B. Sands] uh, oh, I should have these names. But anyway, I got up and I mentioned this. And so it was all over the papers, Baltimore papers and what not. They had to change every certificate in the state of Maryland because it was discriminatory and you couldn't say that. Now they would not let me teach in high school because they said I needed one credit in Language Arts, Now I had a Master's Degree, (chuckles) I had three Master's Degrees. I got that, then I needed one in Economics. Well, I went to Harford Community on the Proving Grounds. So they said I needed something else in order to teach in high school and the State Department, whoever the official was, said "I see what Harford County's trying to do." Harford County had a bad name, a very bad name [in the state]. The Judge Rossum said Harford County has been in these courts more than all the counties combined -- ten times, I think it was, but I could be wrong. He said, "I don't want to see you come here again. I want you to desegregate those schools" or integrate, whichever they want to do. So I was punished for that, the entire … even after I returned they did the same thing. So they put me up at what they call Hickory; it used to be Central Consolidated and I was there three years in the sixth grade because they didn't have room in their middle school [Southampton] at that time. Finally, they let me go to Aberdeen High School but they would not -- now remember I was teaching tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades [in Africa] but they put me in the ninth grade. Anything, just to punish you.
Now Mr. Potter was not a bad principal. He really wasn't but the supervisor; he left much to be desired. So later there was a young man who didn't have tenure and they wanted [to] save his job, so they moved me from Aberdeen to Havre de Grace and there I had Dr. Thomas Dubel He was a great principal, he really was. He put me in the ten, eleventh, and … the first year I was teaching students who couldn't learn too well. [I was put on the 3rd
floor in a book room.] They were all seniors and God just blessed me with a gift to be able to reach young people and I love that and I love teaching. Every one of those kids graduated and Dr. Dubel called me into his office and he said, "Mrs. Grant, Mr. [Risby] called me. He didn't finish high school and his desire was for his son to finish. He said he was so happy that his son was graduating that he cried. And that just blessed my heart so. Then Dr. Dubel gave me eleventh and twelfth graders and I was teaching History then and so some of the other teachers didn't like it because they graduated the twelve grades and I have all this free time. So then again I was ostracized.
Then again it got to a point where I was over-supervised; they even wanted to take me out of the classroom. So what they did was, there was a little book room [on the 1st floor] and I had been in a little room before. In this little book room, they gave me a job [as a teacher to watch students do their work who had in-school suspension] that they have aides doing. Everything to make me look like I was not a competent teacher. The teachers would send the students there who were put out of class for whatever reason -- in-school suspension -- that's what it was called. And that was ok. They had a typewriter in there and I was president of the NAACP at that time. So the kids were doing their work in their little cubicles and I was busy doing my typing and what not. Then some of the teachers didn't like that because they had to do all this work and mark their papers and what not and rather than have a student aide go to the teachers' rooms to collect the work, they decided I needed to do that -- go from room to room. Now prior to that, it was getting so ugly that George Lisby, who I had gone to elementary school with him; I'd gone to high school with him; gone to Bowie with him; taught school with him at the [Havre de Grace] Consolidated School -I have to say something about George Lisby.
There's a school down here named George Lisby Elementary School -- Hillsdale. I'm not going to say it but after he died, I demanded that they name a school after him. Well, they called it -- I said "No. you're going to put his name on that school." And they did -- George D. Lisby. But that young man was a year behind me in Perryman
School. He had a photographic memory. His sister was a year ahead of me. He skipped three grades. When they would take him to the state meetings and then roll off these figures, the state department, you know what they were paying for this, this, and this. Dr. Williams would take George with him. He worked at the state department also. By the time they finished with the figures, just lines of them, George (snap of fingers) had the answer. And they asked Dr. Williams to stop bringing him because he was just too brilliant and he was like my son. There's not a word he cannot spell.
Well, when they couldn't get to me, finally Mrs. Mitchell had another [hearing at the Board] suit. Her husband came, Mr. Clarence Mitchell, Jr., a courthouse is named for him downtown, and they came to the [Harford County] Board of Education. She called him "her gun". (Chuckles) There was a suit that said they could no longer harass me -- some people say "ha-RASS". So when they couldn't get to me they got to my children. My daughter was in this school down here, so we took her out. Took my niece, my sister-in-law's three children and my sister's two and sent them to the Christian School up in Dublin. Then when my son was ready to go to school, first grade down here, there was a teacher that was in only her first or second year. Now he could read. He could read when he was three years old. He could spell. So she had alphabets so she put them in about five in disorder. And he just. "A-C-B-D". And she kept saying she wanted him to do them this way. And he went on and said them. She said, "I can't teach him." Well, he knew all of that. Then there was a teacher that volunteered to teach him in the first grade. They told her if she taught him she would lose her job. She told me later. So he had a tutor right here in this house, a minister from Swan Creek. He said, "Benjie isn't interested in this. He knows how to read, he knows how to spell; he can count." So my girlfriend, one of my roommates from Bowie, talked about a school. He was called autistic and they think autistic children are stupid. It's just the opposite. So we put him there and he said, "Mom, I don't belong on this hall" [at the Forbush School]. So, finally we put him in a private school. My mother knew a minister who had a school down here in Joppa and he went to school there [at Faith Baptist School]. They had what they called paces and the kids could move at their own pace. He and I would be up sometimes two, three o'clock in the morning going through them. Then he learned to do it on his own.
He went from one grade to the other, rapidly. Then he said, "Mom, I want to go to school like Grace does." We had adopted a girl from Liberia and she finally was at Aberdeen High [Middle] School. So we sent him to the middle school when she was still at the other school because they wouldn't take him. They had a little problem with the color of our skin also. And they didn't want black males [mixing with non-black females].
DW What year is this?
JG I can't remember what year it was. I wish I had written these things down. Grace graduated in '86 and he graduated in '87. So it was somewhere in the [seventies or] eighties; that's all I can say.
DW Wow.
JG So we did send him to the middle school. I went during American Education Week and Shirley Rose was the principal there at that time -- a black female. And there he was sitting in the library with a paper and crayon. I asked the aide, I said, "How long have you been here?"
And she told. I said, "How long has he been here?" And she said, "He was here when I came." I marched right down, found out why he wasn't in class, went to the principal (and asked) "Why isn't he in class?" (She said) "Well, I don't know," But it seems as if they were told "he can't learn." Because he had been labeled as a non-learner. So I had taught with Florence Stansbury and Mrs. Mildred Stansbury was the counselor. She had taught me and I had worked with her at Aberdeen High School. So Florence said, "Janice, I'll teach him." Well, they didn't have any, they didn't bother the Stansburys. That was a big name in Havre de Grace, Dr. George Stansbury, Dr. Clayton Stansbury and Mr. Stansbury had worked in civil rights himself, Mr. Clayton and the Bransfords and what not. So there were certain people they did [not] try to give any trouble to. So Florence took Ben and took him into her class -- they had open classrooms then. There was a little Caucasian girl. She was so sweet. She worked with him to bring him up to where they were. I wish I knew her name. Then when he took a test and what not, he passed every one of them. Then when he went to high school, a teacher -- and I am so sorry I didn't right that name down. She was in her second year and she was teaching Ben. She refused to give him bad grades. She was told to give him failing grades. She would not do it. She gave him A's and B's. She said he knows the work. You know they wouldn't give her tenure? But she, in my writings, I'm putting all these names and I regret now that I don't have that. But maybe I can add them later, you think?
DW Yea, you can do a supplement.
JO Oh, great.
DW You can't edit the checks but you can do a supplement.
JO Oh, I'll certainly give those people -- I believe in giving honor where honor is due and giving credit where credit is due.
DW So, '54 was Brown vs. The Board of Education. Harford County Schools took twelve [ten] years to get fully integrated. '65 -'66 was the first --
Jo They would not have done it then
DW official
JO if Dr. Willis had his way.
DW Mmm hmm, So, you're talking about the eighties, so even though things were fully integrated in '65 -'66 school year, there is still this kind of problem going on in the eighties?
JO Yes, and I have to say this to you. In court, Dr. Willis in on the stand and Mrs. Mitchell was a superb, brilliant lawyer and she asked him about why he had this -- I guess I'll call it -- restraint against black teachers and he said he did not believe that a black teacher was equal to a white teacher. He said that he didn't think that black teachers could teach white children. They would have to have special classes to us how to teach white children. Special classes to even teach us how to talk. I don't know where this idea came from. Or who he knew.
DW Let's take a break.
So before the break we were talking about the fact that the first fully segregated school year was '65 -'66, yet there were still things going on well into the eighties. And while the camera was off, you were talking about sections of Harford County that are still very white.
JO Right and there were students who should have gotten scholarships and didn't, depending on whether or not the Council wanted them to. I remember one incident in particular. This was not a -- I think she was Puerto Rican and she and another girl were pretty much tied -- this was Havre de Grace High School -- for the valedictorian. And they made it as though she had just like one little point less; like running a race. You know, I used to be an athlete and in all the races and what not, whoever, you know, breaks that rope first and it can be what? Just a mini-second or so. But they did that to keep her from getting the top. I wonder how she must of felt, you know? But it's things like that and then the grades. There were some good teachers. Excellent teachers. There are teachers, even to this day -- I went to the meeting last night, town meeting; there was a teacher, a Social Studies teacher at Aberdeen when I was a Social Studies teacher and I know he hated me. It didn't bother me that was on him. But to this day, he doesn't want to speak and that's ridiculous. I've been retired and he's retired but I just make him speak. "Hi, Bill, How are you." (Chuckles) And he's just like frozen.
But I remember the things the teachers used to do. Mr. Bill Taylor, he's passed away now but he would collect me at my home, the old house that we no longer have and Cora and George and drive us all to school. We were just starting. We didn't have any money to buy a car and he became very ill and I went to visit him at the hospital. He told me, "Janice, I didn't want to retire when I did but I retired because I wouldn't do to you what they wanted me to do." They had sent me from Aberdeen, as I said to save this young man's job but he didn't lose because he wasn't good but because he just didn't have the years -- but they thought Dr. Dubel wouldn't be a good principal and he was excellent. So they moved Dr. Dubel -- he said, "Janice, do you want to go back to Aberdeen?" I said, "No, I like it here." -- [So Dr. Dubel was moved] to Aberdeen High School and brought the man who had been my supervisor [Ronald Webb] who really did not write good things about me and made him principal at Havre de Grace so that he would do the job that the others hadn't done. So Bill was, Bill Taylor, William Taylor was the assistant principal and he said, "I retired." One day I came to school and they had him write a letter. We were due there at 7:15. The letter said, you were due here at 7:15. You got here at 7:16, so that was a mark against me there. Just different, different, things.
And the kids would come to me, come to my room because they knew I was a Christian and they would ask me to pray for them and I would. They would come to my room to have prayer. I didn't lead because the law had said it had to be student led. We had what was called prayer around the pole. I don't if you've heard of that or not but there was a time when the students would get out and pray around the pole for this country. Bill said, "Janice, every day there were two teachers there who (I won't say) but two females. Every day they come to me, they question your students to find out what you teach and they would tell me. "Well, she talked about the Bible and she talked about this and that..." Well, when I taught History, the Lord Jesus Christ is in History -- Jerusalem, Israel -- and I taught about that, Yes, I did. But they thought it was terrible. I didn't preach but I didn't shy away from talking about the Lord and what not. I had been to Israel, I had seen the places and what not, walked where Jesus walked and things like that and I have to say I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ because he said clearly, "If you deny me before men, I will deny you before my Father who is in Heaven." I don't want to be denied when the day comes when He calls me. But everything possible that was done was done. Bill said, "I just went on and retired. I was not going to write up negative reports about you." So then later they had a principal who he and I both had worked on our doctorates together. They were free. University of Maryland was giving them and all you had to do was do the work. They made him principal, Jon Andes, and as I say, he had been a social studies teacher with me. He was fair, very fair. So Jon wouldn't do what they wanted. They brought a black man in who had been at the State Department of Education with my husband, [James Bennett]. He knew my husband and they brought a woman in who lived over here on Rogers Street. She did everything she could to destroy me. I just listened to her. When she finished, I'd get up and go. They finally, she was so negative toward me, they gave her a job in the central office. (Laughter) I didn't say you wouldn't have that job if I hadn't filed a suit for teachers to be hired and promoted. That was a suit I had filed alone. But I didn't say that. And really it wasn't me, it was God. Later this fellow they brought in -- and then they brought another woman in of color. She was brilliant. She's passed away. She began and two teachers said to her, "You better leave that woman alone. She's a Christian." And she did. She understood but the principal -- I don't want to say what his -- anyway, he had been promised a job in the central office if he would write me up either to give me a second class certificate or fired. James Bennett was his name. James Bennett did everything he could. The kids would say -- I would leave my door open -- I didn't have anything to hide. The kids would go to the bathroom and come back and say, "Mrs. Grant, Mr. Bennett, the principal is behind your door listening." They had the PA System on and I could hear when it would click off and on. So he called me into his office one day. I was teaching History as I said, -- Social Studies and I was telling students it was what they called Black History month. I said Beethoven was a black man. His teacher Hayden was a black man. Well, they came and said the music teacher said Beethoven wasn't. I said, "They make him look white but he was a black man." The principal called me in his office. I was "teaching wrong." Dah, dah, dah, and so forth -- I said, "Well, I know a little bit about History. I know a little bit about -- I Beethoven was a black man." "Well, there are people that write things wrong" and what not. Then I told him about some other things. I said, "Do you know who settled the differences between the Arabs and the Jews, who are cousins by the way?" Abraham is the father of both the Arabs and the Jews. You know that. It was Sarah and Hagar. Hagar was the maid. They didn't have children. She told Abraham to go in with the maid, anyway -- Hagar's children are the Arabs and the others are the Jews. So they're cousins but they're warring. So Dag Hammarskjöld was the under Secretary or Secretary at that time of the United Nations and he was killed in a plane crash. The man under him, next in line like the vice president would be, was Ralph Bunch. Ralph Bunch was a black man. So in 1948, Ralph Bunch settled at that time, the dispute between the Arabs and the Jews and Israel became a nation for the first time since the Biblical times, in 1948. And that was a black man but that's not taught. But I taught it and he was telling me that -- now he's the principal -- that I was teaching things that were not true. I said, "Well, I learned a few things since my Mom taught me." She was educated in Philadelphia and she knew some things. She always taught us as much black history as she could.
Mr. Roye had gone to Lincoln University and Langston Hughes was a classmate of his. Langston Hughes was a very famous poet and also one of his favorite stories was named Simple and he wrote "Simple Speaks His Mind". Langston Hughes would come to that little -- it's still there in Havre de Grace on Alliance and Stokes Street -- to that colored school in the basement with his books. Many times he would come and visit and read his poems to us and his stories and what not. We didn't even know that this was a great writer, author. All we knew was that it was Mr. Roye's classmate and he came to us to do that. But we were privileged. We had a librarian, Mrs. Mildred Stansbury, who helped my son when they were trying to discredit him. She said, "No, look at his grades. He's doing well. And you ought to hear him quote the Bible." But she went to the Board and asked them about a library and they said. "Well, you need to have a librarian." She said, "Well, I'm the librarian." And she got the first library for us. There was a lady named Frances Brown. I didn't know her but she had a collection of rare black books and the books covered one whole half of the library and then the other side. Rare books. And when we desegregated in 1965, Dr. Willis ordered Mr. Roye to burn those books. Burn those books! They opened the little chute and started shoving -- I just grabbed books and grabbed books, as many as I could. Can you imagine that?
There was one book that would tell you how you could identify, possibly identify, the tribe that you came from in Africa. Certain characteristics like they called him Wilt the Stilt, the basketball player? He was from the Watusi group in East Africa. Then of course you had people like this -- I can't think of his name -- the boxer who has -- but anyway, there were just certain characteristics you could this was before DNA. Of course, you have DNA now. You can find out that you're part this and part that. My great-grandfather's mother was Jewish/Irish. And he somehow, she and a Mulatto mated up anyway, and he was born. He was sent out from the family at nine years of age to go -- this was Newport News, Virginia, to go to Richmond to find his dad. He never found him but when he came back he had enough money and he bought two whole streets and he owned houses in Richmond; houses in Newport News. He, there was no place to bury black people in Newport News and so he had a dairy and went to the townspeople and told them he needed pastureland for his cows. They didn't believe in banks. You know a lot of old people didn't. My mother called him "Papa". James East was his name. So he bought 20 acres, paid for them in cash and he [set up] the first cemetery for black people. It's had several different, different names but Jim researched that. I have pictures. Now there's a tombstone in the center of it that says "James East" and it tells where he lived, it's on Shell Road, and what he had done and things like that, to his honor. And I'm trying to now, hopefully, get money with my cousins -- one in New York and one in Virginia -- to get that place cleared because it's overgrown now. That's disrespectful to have a cemetery that … and I am hoping to go down there and get some of the boy scouts and other people to come and just clean up the place. They used to do that.
My mother always has -- just like this house. She started the church right here as I said, in the living room then down in the basement. And Ernestine here was the first to and still is the treasurer of that church, which of course later the church bought a day room from the Proving Ground and that was the church they called Aberdeen Bible Mission in the beginning because they [the town] said there wasn't enough land.
But my step-grandfather's sister, my Godmother had given the land to my mother. He had left it to her, my grandmother. Mom asked grandmom if she could buy it. Woody and I went with her and we helped and got the land and later they purchased additional land where a lady -- I think she was Miss Amanda -- had had a store, and they built this really, I think, nice church at the end of Edmund Street called Aberdeen Bible Church now. It's just a lot of history and things [that were not written].
I remember one night, Vivian, Carol and I were coming from the movies and we shouldn't have done this but Mom didn't let us, allow us to go to the movies, because it was segregated. She'd take us to Baltimore with my aunts and cousins, but we snuck in and went up. When we came out to go home we were chased by some soldiers. We ran and hid under the hedges and what not. But that was one unpleasant incident.
I don't really have that many good, good memories of things that occurred other than when we would get together as groups. I have a friend I grew up with, Barbara Christy McCain, who just lost her son. Great friends! But we all mingled together and I can't think of anyone -- Oh yes! I have two friends, Carol Preston and another girl who lived on the edge here, and we would play together. I went to school in the first grade and I said to my mother, I said, "Mom, Carol and (I can't remember her name) they weren't in school. We were all the same age. All should have been in first grade. And that's when she told me about segregation. And I remember my brother, Jerry, my youngest brother; he had a friend, Jimmy Tobin. The Tobins owned a lot here in Aberdeen at one time. Jimmy and Jerry were friends. Jerry came home from school, first grade, and he said the same thing. He said, "Janice, Jimmy wasn't in school today." And that's when I told him about segregation. It really affected him. I don't know, it just did something to him. He looked at his arms and he looked in the mirror and he couldn't understand why he couldn't be treated like the others. He did, of course, eventually go to Aberdeen High School because things had been settled by then.
DW Did Harford County -- was there any other county in Maryland that drug their feet as much as Harford County?
JG No, Harford County was THE only one.
DW The only one.
JG Some counties like Baltimore City--BAMl Immediately. As I said I had relatives who went to school there. Still some of them wanted to stay at their own schools and still some people -- when they had the freedom of choice, when you could sign up your child and they could go -- they called it the Pilot Program. Two black teachers went to the schools: Florence Stansbury and Mrs. [Bernice] Williams. I told you about the Stansbury name and the Williams name. Dr. Percy Williams' wife, Mrs. Bernice Williams, and then of course, Florence [Stansbury], Mrs. Williams and then later Christine Tolbert was chosen. She and Dr. Williams were cousins. I'm not taking anything away from her, she was a good teacher. She had gotten a Masters also. It was step by step, gradually, then finally as Ernestine is saying, it was '65 and they let us chose the school we wanted to go to. So I chose Hall's Cross Roads, right over here in Aberdeen. There was a black principal there, Mr. Mears. He was excellent. I was only there one year, '65-'66, because in '66 we moved to Nashville. And I didn't teach here again until we came back from Africa. And they STILL, still had that animosity. I was being used as an example to the other black teachers to teach them: This is what will happen to you. Don't you know, it worked? Not anyone else. Now one teacher, Gerry Washington, she was subpoenaed. She didn't want to come and then the -- not principal, I guess you would say principal -- President of Coppin State College, they subpoenaed him so that ... and asked him, "Did you really hire Janice Grant?" He said, "Yes, she was qualified. I hired her." He didn't want to come because he was concerned about his job. But when you are subpoenaed, you know what that is, you have no choice. Then they subpoenaed Christine Tolbert. She said, "Well, I've been subpoenaed so I guess I have to testify." But Anna Brashears, my husband and myself, we were plaintiffs. As I say, he was punished and they wouldn't give him a job but the interesting thing is, after he was hired by the state department and was working there, Harford County sent him an application to come back and teach in Harford Count. They were concerned because there was George Lisby, Dr. Williams and Woody and that they deny Title 1 and Title 9 to the county and they wouldn't get the funds. They thought my husband would be as evil to the county as they were to him and to me, But I never, except for Jon Andes and Dr. Dubel, I was under scrutiny, over-supervised, never could satisfy anything, you walked in school, you never knew what you would meet. I had a program, as I told you, I had been in the Peace Corps, and I had designed it for a youth or student volunteer program and wrote it up. My idea was for the students to go out and help the elderly people and to do things that were needed. The principal would not let me implement that program. He would not let me do that program. Don Osman came to me and asked me, he bent down at my desk and said, "I would like to help you with your student program. Now he had shown it to him and I didn't trust him to be honest with you because of other things that had occurred. I said, "No, I'd like to do the program myself." I knew what I wanted to do. The principal told me, he said -- his name is Ronald Webb -- he said, "No, you can't take the kids out of class, you can't keep them after school which was a lie because that's exactly what Osman did. Then I had another program. I went to Jessup -- the warden at the time was female. It doesn't make any difference and it was a program called "Scared Straight." I didn't invent that but it was going on. I thought it would help the kids who were busy not doing what they should. She said sure, she'd be glad to have the students come and have the inmates or what not work with them. Wouldn't let me do that. Then after I left, they put someone else there. Had another program to help the mothers because in Africa I had helped the mothers to learn to do certain things for their children's health and what not adult education and things like that because I had done that in Mississippi in the Freedom Schools. I taught, of course they made me a principal because I was a teacher. Most of the people were younger students from Kent State and different places like that. We went all over Mississippi, speaking to the people, registering voters and trying to stay alive.
One girl, white girl, was walking -- we were told never ever to go out by ourselves. I had a car. I drove to Mississippi, there and back. But she decided she wanted to go. You know some young people don't believe people can really be as evil as they are. So she just went walking down the street and four white guys came by in a car and they said you know we killed some black men, dumped them in the Tallahatchie River, the Pearl River and there was another river which was their favorite to put black people in. And so they said, we never killed a white woman. So they put a rope around her neck and started driving and then they drove even faster and faster and she ran. And they laughed and finally let her loose. She said, "I urinated on myself." She was so frightened.
Then of course, I came out of my school one day and there were three guys coming toward me with a crowbar and as I said, I had a car. Very slowly I backed to my car and jumped in my car and took off! And I out ran the KKK but I came home with a bullet hole in the rocket panel of my car. There were different incidences, you know. You were just trying to keep alive. And as I said, they burned the church in Philadelphia, Mississippi and we went to the church. And Hallelujah! We put a chair on the embers. I mean they burned it to the ground. I wish I'd had a camera. But a lady sat on top of those embers and she sang "Freedom Is a Constant Struggle" Oh, my. just to hear her wail, it went right into your spirit. Then we had what they called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Mississippi went [to the convention] and the black people had no vote so Fanny Lou Hamer, very famous person, used to go to the different towns and preach to the people and tell them, "You get out there and vote. We'll go with you." "You register." At that time they would make them try to recite the Constitution and some of the people who were registering them couldn't do it themselves. I remember Rev. Lee went to register and don't you know they let him register and shot him to death on the courthouse steps? Oh there were some awful, awful things that happened. As I say that morning when they found Mickey and Andy and Jimmy we froze when we saw the picture on TV because they were our friends.
Now the idea of killing them -- they called Mickey a nigger lover because he had been there two years -- they shot Andy, I mean immediately! And Jimmy, they put him against a tree and chained him and whipped him with chains. And when they did the autopsy, they said every bone in his body was crushed. Two of the doctors regurgitated. They'd never seen anything like it. Now Andy had the soil clutched in his hand and perhaps he hadn't really died totally and maybe he was trying to dig his way out because it wasn't dirt that had fallen in his hand, it was clutched in there as if he had been digging.
The good news is, I went down in 2014, as I said for our 50th year reunion, and I had a good friend. The FBI grounds has a huge steel plaque with their names on it: Michael ["Mickey" Schwerner], James Chaney, and Andy Goodman. Now when they were to be buried, the other two were Jewish. They would not -- the Jewish mothers came down for Jimmy's funeral there in Mississippi and they wanted their sons to be buried there with him but they wouldn't let them be buried there so they had to take the bodies back to New York. And my friend Susan Butler, she was a teacher in New York. She came later because she had a course she had to study for her teaching. She said she got on the same plane to go to Mississippi that they had brought Mickey's body back and Andy's body back on. She was one of the teachers in my [Freedom] school and she and I are friends to this day. Now we had lost contact. Let me tell you how she found me.
The old house here [on Edmund St], as I said, they were going to bulldoze it and they had it on the Internet -- the picture of the house and all that and the story. And her son was searching the internet and she said he came upon where it said "Janice Grant, Aberdeen, Maryland" and he told his mother because she had been trying to find me for [50] years. We lost contact because I was in Tennessee, then I was in Africa, you know, and Texas. So she wrote me a letter. She said, "I found you! It's Susan." I said I have to have a last name, I didn't, you know, "Susan."
So finally she sent me a picture and she reminded me and when we were down in '64, we roomed together in a hotel that we couldn't have stayed in before when we were there. (Laughter) We visited the COFO Office where Bob Moses had his office. COFO stood for Council of Federated Organizations. We had a SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating [Committee], we had NAACP, we had CORE -- Congress of Racial Equality -- and SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference], Dr. King's group. We all joined together to fight segregation. Skin color didn't mean anything. Who cared what color you were? We had one friend, Ursula Junk, who had come from Germany. There were some Europeans that had come to fight segregation. I had a car so we all -- nobody would feed us, so we decided to go to another state [town] to try and find out if we could be fed. But before we went to visit a professor at Ole Miss -- James [Silver] (I'll have to put this in the supplement). One of the boys had written him to ask can I visit you. He had written this book, "Mississippi: The Closed Society". So I drove up and of course, Ole Miss is great now. You know, it has -- you know that story that you -- the black football player [Michael Oher] that used to be here on the Orioles [Ravens] team? What was the name of that movie? [The Blind Side] It's recent. But anyway, this white family took him in and all.
James Silver was his name. [He wrote] Mississippi: The Closed Society. So he let us come in and he entertained us in his home at Ole Miss and said they had to sleep on their floor at night -- he and his children and his wife because they would shoot into these homes because he had exposed Mississippi. (A jolly little ring tone interrupted the talking. I won't answer because it's interfering, isn't it? (Laughter) Will you answer it for me?)
DW Well, just let it go to voice mail and I'll cut this part out. (Laughter)
JG (Laughter) Oh, it's in my jacket. (Laughter)
DW There ya go.
JG Wouldn't you know? Let me see. I don't know if it was my husband or not. Well, we don't know. It doesn't matter because he knows where I am. Ok. (Chuckles)
DW I think the time is going to be getting pretty short on the recorder as it is.
JG All right. I wanted to tell you what happened to us on the road, going up. We -- nobody would serve us. It was because of me. And one of the boys said, "Janice, I can't believe this that nobody will serve you."
So on the way back, there was a huge Great Dane in the road. (Smacks hands together). My car hit it and burst the radiator and all the water came out. Couldn't drive. So a group came by and they were going to give the kids a ride. They saw me and they said, "We're going to come back and get you all because you got a nigger with you." So a black family came by and picked them up and took them into Jackson and said they would send somebody back for me. So they put me in the trunk of my car so they couldn't find me when they came back. And they couldn't find me but the interesting thing is: they didn't burn the car. So the next day Bob sent someone up to get the car and actually paid to get the radiator fixed and went to -- wasn't supposed to go to this garage, There were only certain ones you were to go to but I needed gasoline and I just went to this one. And this white man, he was so kind, so nice to me. It was like he wanted to say, "I'm not like that. I don't feel that way towards you." But that was a rare moment because most of the time you got the "n" word and spit on and things like that and they could have killed us all, they would have. But they killed the boys thinking that that would make us all leave. Many of the students had come for like two weeks, maybe three weeks, and we all got together in the COFO office and said we will not leave. That just made us determined that we were going to stay. Bob asked me if I would stay and work with them for the rest of the years when I had just gotten married -- just one year -- and my husband didn't want to come because he said, "Janice, I can't be non-violent." He said I did that in college but if they come to me, I'm afraid I'm going to have to do something. And they had a group they called, a group of black men, who had rifles and all. I want you to know where I lived, there were six of us and the lady's name was Marge Shank. We lived in the Verdant Addition. They had what they called "safe homes" and every single night one black man would stand guard over us, in case anyone came to harm us because they were white people in a black neighborhood. It was just amazing that -- 11 some … everyone wasn't frightened. There were people willing to risk their lives and they were running out of money because they had to pay these people to feed us and for us to stay in their homes and they were all poor people. Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and the little short fella that used to sing, Sammy Davis, Jr. Well, they flew to Mississippi and I think the first thing they brought was -- I don't know if it was $20,000 or $60,000 -- and gave it to Bob when they found out they were running out of money. Then Pete Seeger -- have you ever heard of him? Ahh, I loved him. Pete Seeger came and entertained us at Tugaloo [College]. That was our home base, Tugaloo and he sang, you know.
(Doug sneezes.) Bless you. Peter, Paul and Mary came and they sang "How many roads must a man go down before they call him a man?" Or whatever. Then there was a show on TV called Room 222 and this actress came down and the whole play and I bought a record of it but my mother-in-law threw it away, and (Doug coughs.) You need you water, don't you?
DW Sorry.
JG Oh, that's all right. The play was called "In White America" and they were talking about all the things that they were doing against black people. And one thing -- remember we were registering voters because they didn't want black people to vote and the girl on the record said, "Pa says if the black man ever got the right to vote, and black people got in office, Pa said that's the thing we have to fear most." And look. Look what has happened because black people have the right to vote. And it annoys me when people will not go out and vote. I say if you don't vote, you don't have any right complaining.
We had lots of famous people who would come and entertain us. I remember Harry Belafonte. They were in a hotel, of course, they let them go. They were famous people and they had money. One of them said, "Who's gonna sleep on the side by the door?" (Laughter) Because they didn't know what may happen, you know. But they came. He didn't come once. Harry Belafonte came more than once and brought money. I don't think know about that to help. You had people like Lena Home and the fella who played in the Godfather. During the march on Washington, they all came and they came to help, so it was never a black-white thing, fortunately. There was never a "Hey, I don't like white people" because we weren't reared that way. We have plenty of them in our family now that are so-called white people because I always say Race, Black Race, White Race, Brown Race, Red Race, Yellow Race. I said there's only one race called "human." One blood and one color, just different shades of brown. Every human being on earth came from Adam and Eve. We're related. God created one man, Adam, and we all know about the floating rib. And, of course, we know about the flood, Noah and his sons, where did all these other troubles come from? Well, if you know history, you know why you have these different shades. You have the Garden of Eden, we know was partially in Africa. We know that there are two rivers that still remain today, still called the Tigris and the Euphrates in Iraq. Then the other river, the great river, the Nile, it came right on down. We don't know how they got separated but there are three Niles, all one river. At the mouth, it's the White Nile, the Blue Nile and then the Nile and that was one of the rivers of the Garden of Eden. It's right there in Africa today. There's so much. Then you go to Greece and Turkey and there's more about the Bible there than there is in Jerusalem and Israel because that's where the Isle of Patmos where John went in the cave and God gave him the Revelation and he wrote it. And you can still see some things on the cave there. Then you have the gravesite of two of the disciples, there, not in Jerusalem, not in Nazareth but in Greece and Turkey. And Turkey, you know is the only nation that's on both continents Asia and Europe of all the nations. And they don't call it Europe, and they don't call it Asia; they call it Eurasia over there because Europe and Asia are connected. There is no separation between them. The only separation between Europe and Asia is the Ural Mountains and you cross over into the other. So they say, no, no there is no Europe. There's Eurasia. So I learned to do that.
While we were there I had a radio program as well as a TV program. The radio program was called "ELWA", Eternal Love Winning Africa. Then I also had a program over Voice of America and it spanned the three continents. It was a biblical program trying to lead people to the Lord Jesus. God just blessed us and God used us. I said He could have used anyone on earth but for some reason He chose us. The Bible says He takes the simple things of the world to confound the wise. (Laughter) I guess that was us -- the simple things. I like my state, I like my county and I would love to be able to do things. Fortunately, there are many good people here, many, many good people. I can go to any restaurant I want to, I could possibly buy -- now, this house was built in 1960 and for 13 years no one would -- it was the only house on the block -- no one would build on this side or that side because black people lived here. 1960, my mother and stepfather lived here alone all those years. Then they built this over here, we went to look at it? And the man tried to force us to buy it because we looked at it. And Vernon Terry said no, got something from the five and dime calling it a contract. Then we built our house and then you can see all the other houses here. But there are only three houses -- two when we moved here. We've been here in that house, mmm, I think it was 1979 -- Isn't that awful? I don't even remember when we built our house. (Chuckles) But we've been here for 35 years; I can go back and subtract it. (Laughter)
DW Thirty-five years would be about 1981.
JG Well, I think it was -- my mom died in '89, so we came -- it was'79, so it's been a little longer than that because we lived up in the apartments up there [in Aberden above Ollie's].
DW Mmmhmm.
JG But that's -- many good things happened. I said there's the Greene's -- Montgomery, Roger... Now his family was historical. Abraham Lincoln gave a huge, massive silver plate and silver set to him because John Rogers -- if you know your history -- and then you had -- there are buildings in Washington named for Meigs Greene. He opened the gateway to the East, China. You know the Great Wall of China, they closed themselves off. They were a part of that great naval family. Mrs. Greene was one of the persons who started that school up in Bel Air which is a private school. I can't think of the name of that school either.
DW Harford Day?
JG Harford Day.
DW Mmmhmm.
JO They wanted their children to have a different education. I think Meigs did go to the public school for a year or so until they started Harford Day. But you know the kids go on trips and things like that. When I taught school, I was blessed here; the military would give us buses and what not to take the kids. So I took the kids to Philly to see the uh -- you know that's like our nation's history began there -- the Liberty Bell, Constitution Hall, and those things; some of those kids had never even been across the Susquehanna Bridge.
DW Oh, wow.
JG I have a Jewish friend who for two years she worked to get us to the Holocaust Museum and that day the principal, James Bennett, got on the bus and cancelled the trip.
DW Hmm.
JG He wanted to make sure I didn't have anything that I did, you know, that they could say you did things and what not. But I would have speakers to come in from different places and the Proving Ground asked me to come and bring the African artifacts and things, much of which many people have stolen. They sent buses from the Proving Ground to Aberdeen High School for our students to go free. You know the principal [Mr. Potter] would not let the kids go to see that.
DW Hmm.
JG Before I taught, before they gave me a job, some teacher at Havre de Grace High School asked me if -- I think it was Grace, Grace Spry -- to come and bring some artifacts and clothes and show them to the children and I did. Bill Taylor came and he was kind of, you know, black people thought: Africa, grass skirts and burning people in pots and all that and when he came and he saw the beautiful homes and the gasoline stations and the kids and the schools and what not, he said, "It was a nice program, Janice. (Laughter) It was nothing to be ashamed of." And they said to me, "You mean you're going to take your child to Africa?" I said, "They have children in Africa." (Laughter) Oh, boy.
DW Well, like I said, I think the machine is getting towards the end. JG Right.
DW So we really do need to wrap up. Maybe I will get some pictures of some pictures as we finish here. I'd like to thank you very much for your time and interesting history.
JG Oh, sure.